


Janus

by englishable



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-03-25
Packaged: 2018-05-20 06:31:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 48,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5994979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She moves into the apartment beside his, with her flowers and her singing and her brisk optimism, and Ben Solo knows himself just well enough to realize that a person like him really shouldn't have anything to do with a person like her. His good friend Snoke, of course, has other plans, because he gets a certain enjoyment from watching Ben - Kylo Ren, rather, as he calls him - screw things up. Which Ben inevitably does: but that's not where he wants them to end, and maybe Rey doesn't either.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Qiulann](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Qiulann/gifts).
  * Translation into Français available: [Janus](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13631364) by [englishable](https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable), [traitor_for_hire](https://archiveofourown.org/users/traitor_for_hire/pseuds/traitor_for_hire)



> This was my gift for the Valentine’s Day exchange. All of the prompts I was given were great, and I changed my mind several times, but the one I ultimately chose went as follows – “Modern AU where Kylo is dared by his super-duper shithead friend, Snoke, to ask the new girl Rey out but gets rejected harshly because he's an emo loser and if he wants to get to know her then he better do it on his and her own terms.”
> 
> I wanted to preserve some of the canon dynamic between Kylo/Ben and Snoke, mostly to justify why he’d be hanging out with such a manipulative shithead in the first place, and this got completely away from me as a result. I’m sorry it’s so long, and that I had to break it up into parts to meet the deadline, but swear there’ll be some pay-off at the end. I hope slow-burn is your thing. 
> 
> Thank you for reading.

…

Ben has changed the locks to this apartment three times in about as many weeks, from chain to dead-bolt to flat wafer, but apparently those charges of breaking and entering weren’t quite so trumped-up as Snoke has led him to believe.

“Think of me as Schrodinger’s cat,” Snoke says, his boots propped up on an empty kitchen chair. Chunks of ice and rock salt fall off his heels onto the peeling laminate floor. “I’m always here, even when I’m not – you never know which one it’s going to be.”

Ben remains standing. The kitchen is cold, as are his fingers, but there’s perspiration down his sides beneath the threadbare sweater that he wears. In one hand he holds a half-empty cup of thick black coffee, which happens to be the second thing he’s consumed all day. The first was a can of peaches in light syrup at around 2:45 AM.

“That’s not how the quantum superposition principle works,” he says. 

“There, now, you see? I don’t understand why you’re always in such a holier-than-thou hurry to send me packing these days.” Snoke grins. It pulls at the long scar across his face, made by either a switchblade or a piece of glass depending who he tells the story to. “What other person in this sinkhole of a city would willingly sit here and listen to you spout that pointy-headed bullshit?”

Ben glances away.

Dirty plates are piled in the sink, while a stack of mail sits unopened on the counter.  A red light blinks on his phone, as usual, and there is a large dent in the wall beside it. The cast-iron radiator gives off a smell like paraffin wax.

“That’s true.”

“You know it is.” Snoke pockets the roll of dollar bills Ben has permanently loaned him. “While we’re on the subject of quality companionship, though – who was that delicious little morsel I met out in the stairwell earlier?”

Ben glances back at him again.

“She moved into the apartment next door.” He distracts himself by sipping the now-lukewarm coffee, but has to spit it back out. “She’s not your type.”

“Never use the word ‘ _type_ ,’ my young and deeply ignorant pupil. I prefer the word _‘yearly models.’”_

“She’s not your yearly model, then.”

“And you know this – how?” A glint appears behind Snoke’s pale eyes, and Ben wishes he’d simply swallowed the disgusting coffee. “Are you looking to make a purchase, Mr. Kylo Ren?”

(That’s a running joke between them, of course, although only Snoke finds it funny nowadays. Ben can’t remember if it ever really amused him or not.)

But here is what Ben-Ren knows about The Girl, after having had her as his neighbor for two weeks:

She’s twenty, maybe twenty-one. She wears floral print blouses and shamrock-green nail polish. She does not appear to own a car, although she keeps a red moped and rides it everywhere regardless of the weather. She leaves for work at 6:15 every morning, humming folk music as she goes, and comes back early every evening except for Saturdays, when she gets back closer to 11:00 PM. On Sundays she stays home.  Twice he’s met her down in the apartment complex’s basement, seated atop a clothes washer with a highlighted anatomy textbook in her lap, although he’s never said a word to her either time. On her balcony there is a hanging bird feeder, painted to look like a spaceship, but she’ll regularly toss out extra sunflower seed along with stern orders for the sparrows and chickadees to stop fighting one another. 

Ben is thinking of this bird feeder – she may have built it herself, judging by the rough edges, and there’s a stack of empty terra cotta flower pots on her balcony as well – when he answers.

“No,” he says. “And I’d recommend that you leave her alone, too.”

“Oh, that’s great. That’s phenomenal.” Snoke slaps his hand against the table. “I’ve always said you’re the most sexually repressed tight-wad I’ve ever seen, and there’s my proof. I can’t believe it.”

“I’m not –”

Then Ben hears a door slam in the hallway. The first few choral bars of an Olivia Newton John song come swinging through the thin wall. His nerves stiffen, and Snoke sets both feet down on the floor again.

“Listen, now, Ren. Do me a favor – or I’ll do you one, maybe.”  He jerks a thumb over his shoulder. His hands are thin and long and remind Ben of a spider’s legs. “Go ask her out.”

“No.”

“Now, Ren, don’t go being an emo pussy on me again. I always give you good advice, don’t I? Sometimes it’s hard to swallow, I know, but I’ve never once been wrong.”

(Ben has recently begun keeping a bulleted list that contradicts this statement, and he might also say a thing or two about burden of proof, but these things also sound excessively pointy-headed.)

“No.” Now the Girl’s footsteps go padding towards the elevator. “Absolutely not.”

“Ren, Ren! Be reasonable. Who got you that job at the loading docks, remember? You’re the one who lost it, obviously, but I’m the one who wheedled them into giving you a chance – oh, and who covered for you when you fell behind on rent, last week? What upstanding citizen is single-handedly responsible for any social life you still manage to have?” Snoke opens his arms wide in self-presentation. “I’ve spread a veritable cornucopia of opportunity at your table. You’d realize that if you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up – ”

Ben stares at him. Snoke re-crosses his arms, concealing that large tattoo on his wrist. It’s supposed to be a symbol of some kind, white against a field of regularly-refreshed black, but it’s always reminded Ben of an opened bear trap.

“ – And I know you’ve just been _panting_ for any half-assed excuse to talk to her, so by all rights you should thank me for putting you up to it. Am I right, or am I right?”

He can offer no defense, clearly, because it’s true – Snoke always does that, peers straight through his head as though it’s made of glass – and so Ben sets his coffee cup aside and leaves the apartment with his head ducked down.

Snoke hollers his well-wishes.

“Ah, yes. There he goes, our thirty-year-old virgin martyr. Godspeed, boy!”

At the hallway’s far end, The Girl is stepping into their apartment’s capricious elevator. She has a laundry basket balanced on one hip and a pair of headphones over her ears. Ben sprints to get there before the doors close.

“Wait,” he says, already winded. “Hold that. Wait.”

“Sorry?” Her humming stops. She pulls the headphones down to rest around her neck. “Oh! Yes, come in. Which floor do you want?”

“Uh. Basement.”

“Good. That’s where I’m headed.”

He boards the elevator alongside her, about five seconds too late to remember that his feet are bare and that he has no change in his pockets for the vending machine and so he really has no valid excuse for going downstairs at all. He showered and shaved this morning, at least, but his hair hasn’t been properly cut in months and this sweater is unraveling at the elbows.  

_(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)_

Shit.

He stares at the elevator’s buttons, half of which have needed to be written over in permanent marker because they’ve gotten rubbed away. The Girl switches hands with her laundry basket, full of clothes stained by what looks like motor oil, and then leans herself forward into his vision to offer out a flat, unexpectedly callused hand.

“I’m sorry. I don’t think I’ve introduced myself yet.” She has a strong grip, too, as Ben discovers, which jars somewhat against her polished accent. “I’m Regina – well, Rey. I go by Rey. I live in 701.”

“Ben,” he answers. “It’s not short for anything.”

“Ben, you said? That’s my grandfather’s name. Which apartment are you in?”

“703.”

“Oh.” Rey frowns, slightly. Her eyes flicker down the scar that bisects his face from brow to jaw – he’s impressed she can avoid staring at it for any longer than this, really – but then the former polite neutrality replaces it. “Do you happen to know anything about that bald man, in the black shirt? He was here earlier.”

“Yeah. He’s a friend.”

She lets his hand drop, although Ben almost pulls away first. He’d also like to back up further, into the elevator’s corner, because he always keeps an arm’s length of space between himself and everybody else as a general rule, but that would make things awkward.

Or more awkward, rather. More awkward than they already are. 

Rey turns to face the elevator doors again. Ben watches numbers light up dimly overhead. Blood throbs in his ears and throat.

Shit, shit, shit, shit.

 “Uh,” he hears himself say, again, gesturing towards those palimpsestic elevator buttons. “So what landed someone like you in this dismal trash heap?”

“It’s all I could afford while I was going to school.” She turns to sift through her clothes again. The frown returns. “And I didn’t think it was so bad, really. It’s better than a lot of other places I’ve lived. I like the view you get of Takodana Bay.”

“If you can see it through the smog, maybe.”

“Hmmm.”

Ben feels his insides curl up like shriveling leaves. Of course she’d think that way, a person who keeps hand-made bird feeders and flower pots and prefers to shorten a name that means _‘queen’_ into one that means _‘sunshine.’_  

And now she probably thinks he’s a whiny tool, too – not that this assessment would be inaccurate, obviously. He tries again as the elevator shakes and jostles around them.

“What are you studying in school?”

“Massage therapy.” She smooths back a lock of hair behind her ear, where it’s slipped out of that quirky triple-decker bun. “I still need five hundred hours of supervised training to get my state license.”

“Massage therapy?” Ben parrots, and then snorts with derision before he can stop himself. “You mean all that holistic dithering about energy balance and acupressure points? Is there any money in that?”

(Ben’s inflection on this last word _‘that’_ makes it clear he intends it to modify the unspoken word _‘crap,’_ even though hearing this cynicism in his own voice draws him closer to certain blotted-out places inside his mind.

He has quite a few of those.)

“Well, I’m working at the city junkyard now.” Her voice takes on a sharpened edge. “They put me in charge of the trash compactor. I thought classes would be a nice change of mood – otherwise I’ll sit there all day and imagine I’m crushing people’s heads.”

She makes a deliberate, calculated gesture here, pinching her fingers together as though she’s squashing a large beetle between them, and keeps her eyes fixed on him while she does.

“Oh, do you?” This is like writing cursive with the wrong hand, he thinks, like pulling frayed thread through the eye of a needle, and just now Ben can’t decide whether he’d prefer to kill Snoke or himself. “That’s funny.”

“And tell me, what do _you_ do that’s so important?”

Something shoves hard against his heart.

Nothing, Ben could tell her, absolutely nothing, even though his mother still deposits money into his bank account for rent every month – all cash, probably so some libelous reporter won’t find out about it during campaign season. Days when he manages to make it out to the convenience store are considered good ones, shining highlights, and last week he woke from a nightmare about screaming brakes and twisting steel and shattering windshield glass that made him vomit.

(Which he hasn’t done in months, come to think of it, not since the earliest stages of his withdrawal, so maybe that’s another accomplishment to pride himself on: something he can paste onto his CV, alongside the unfinished degree in theoretical physics and the 18E Special Forces service ending in an OTH discharge and all those front-page newspaper clippings from two years ago and a recent twelve-week stint at the Alderaan Rehabilitation Center. He could tell her about that, too.

_“What do I do? Why, I’m the family disappointment. It’s a round-the-clock occupation, but somebody has to do it.”)_

“That’s none of your business,” Ben says .

Her mouth flattens into a line. Her nostrils flare.

“I don’t think I’d want it to be.” The elevator shudders to a halt on the basement level.  Rey leaps out, smacking the ‘close’ button with one arm as she passes. “You know, I’ve been hit on by some jerks before, but I think this lovely conversation wins first prize. Have a nice evening – oh, and tell your friend he’s a fuck-trumpet.”

“A _what_?”

But the doors slam shut before she can educate him on this innovative kenning, so Ben rides their elevator up to the seventh floor again in a compressed and confessional silence.

(It stops, briefly, on the ground level, but he gives the two men waiting there such a vicious look that they swerve around and head towards the stairs.)

Snoke is gone by the time he returns to his apartment, as Ben half-suspected would be the case, although someone has taken the last of his orange juice and put back an empty carton. His coffee can of grocery money has been emptied.

Well.

Ben rummages beneath the sink until he finds two plastic shopping bags. He makes a round of his apartment, plucking burned-out lightbulbs from the desk lamp and the bathroom and the closet. He ties these up together – double-bagged for safety, of course – takes out a claw hammer from his tool kit, and then smashes the glass until its shards resemble fine white sand. The sound is so bright and so loud and so sharp that it crowds everything else out of his head, temporarily.

When Ben is finished, when he catches his breath, he throws away the bag and lies down fully clothed atop an unmade bed. The clock reads 8:42 PM. He stares at its glowing digital numbers and does not fall asleep.

At 1:13 AM, he gets up to press a play-back button on his answering machine.

The messages go on for several months, left weekly like clockwork, but by now the recorder has run out of space because he never deletes anything. He listens to them all, although only to the first parts.

_“Hello, Ben. Are you there? It’s Mom. I was hoping this number hadn’t been disconnected. I remember you said you wanted space, but I hadn’t heard from you and I thought – ”_

_“ Hi, Ben. It’s not midnight yet, over here, but I have a meeting first thing tomorrow morning and so I’m going to bed early like a cretin. I wanted to call and wish you a Happy New–”_

_“Ben? It’s Mom. Again. I’m sorry it’s late, but I’m calling to see if we could find some time to sit down and talk about –”_

_“Ben, I’m not going to fly out there and force you to do anything. You do know that, right? I promised I wouldn’t, and I always try to keep my word. All I want is to hear if– ”_

_“Ben. I don’t know if you’re listening to any of this, but I still want you to know that I don’t blame you for what happened with your fa –”_

_“Ben, please pick u– ”_

_“Ben, I lo– ”_

_“Ben –”_

_“Ben –”_

_“Ben – ”_

…

In February, he forgets his coat – the day is damp but mild, the old snow blackened where it’s piled on the sidewalks – and also happens to forget the keys that are inside of said coat pocket. He is left standing outside his apartment with wet shoes and a new box of saltine crackers in his hand, although he sets this aside to bang his fists against the door until they go numb.

Then Ben presses his back to the wall, sits down with his legs sprawled out, and prepares to meditate on his position as a worthless piece of shit until the second coming of Christ.

He closes his eyes.

 _(“I swear, Ren,”_ Snoke had laughed, once, _“you’re the only human being I’ve ever met who’s more functional when he’s high. It’s the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever seen.”_

 _“It’s because I can remind myself to forget everything I know I should be remembering,”_ he’d explained, rapidly but quite reasonably. _“That’s very difficult to do, otherwise.”)_

Ben is not certain how long he sits there in the hallway, but eventually his thoughts are interrupted by what sounds like the crinkling of brown paper bags and the jangling of a keychain.

Somebody clears her throat.

“Are you locked out?”

Ben opens his eyes. Rey stands there in front of him wearing an oversized parka, an aggressively yellow and equally oversized scarf wound thrice around her neck. She has a bag of groceries balanced on each arm. Wholesome things like bananas and broccoli poke out the top.

This is the first time she’s spoken to him since that day in the elevator.

“No,” he says. “I’m admiring our wallpaper. I find the water stains very thought-provoking as examples of interpretive art – that one there behind you speaks particularly to my postmodern sense of meaninglessness.”

“Did you call the landlord yet?”

“No.”

“Are you planning to?”

“No. I thought dying and rotting here on my own doorstep might send a more memorable statement.”

“Jeez, do you ever listen to yourself?” 

“Not if I can help it.”

“Try it, sometime. It’s like talking to the unholy bastard lovechild of Franz Kafka and Oscar the Grouch.”

Ben isn’t given time to produce a witty retort, even if he could think of one, because by then Rey has vanished into her own apartment without shutting the door behind her. She is gone for about five fussing, muttering minutes, and when she reemerges she is carrying a small leather case and a twist-top flashlight.

She uses this to gesture at him while she talks.

“I’m doing this so I won’t have to look at you anymore,” she tells him. “But if things start to go missing around here and you point any fingers at me, I’ll kill you and feed your body through the car crusher at work. Understand?”

“Is my verbal agreement enough, or would you prefer a signature? I don’t have a pen on me at the moment, so I’ll have to open a vein.”

“Get out of my way.”

He slides to the right, rocks back onto his heels. Rey squats down, shines her flashlight through the keyhole for thirty contemplative seconds, and then unzips her leather case to reveal a twenty-piece professional locksmith’s kit. 

Ben blinks. She selects one of the round-headed picks and slips it into place.

And then Rey becomes focused on her work, so Ben can study her profile. Up close he notices that there is a light smattering of freckles on her nose, across her cheeks, maybe from faded sunburn, and that her eyes are neither brown nor green but some shade of hazel in the middle.

_(“…If only you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)_

“They don’t teach this in massage therapy class,” he says. “Do they?”

“Nope. Foster care.” She turns the stainless steel handle in her fingertips. “I spent a year with this one sterling-quality asshole who wouldn’t even let me back into the house unless I had money to give him – it was an educational experience, though. By the end I could steal a car’s hubcaps and radio in under ten minutes and still have time left over to write _‘wash me’_ on the back windshield.”

“And is that where you acquired your talent for honing such unconventional insults?”

“No, I learned that from a nun – Sister Maria Guadalupe Garcia Zavala. We called her Sister Maz.”

Rey doesn’t glance over at him as she says this. Her conversational tone doesn’t change. For another minute or so Ben listens to the clinking of her lock pick, the dripping snowmelt off her shoes, until she speaks to him again.

“Can I ask you a question, now?” She places an ear against his door to hear the tumblers turning. “I think that’d only be fair, since I just told you something kind of ugly about myself.”

Ben ought to let her know it wasn’t ugly, that he knows very well what can make a person ugly on the inside and what can’t, but instead he stares down at his spread-out hands and nods. She nods as well.

“Were you ever in the army?”

He closes his hands into fists, watches the skin over his knuckles turn white. She keeps talking.

“Your mail got mixed up with mine last week. I didn’t open it, obviously, but I saw you had a letter from the VA – my grandfather was a pilot in the British Royal Air Force, so that’s the only reason I’m asking. You don’t have to answer me if you don’t want to.”

Ben stares at his distorted reflection in the brass doorknob.

“My grandfather was a pilot too. 66th Air Base Wing.” He rubs a hand over his mouth. “I didn’t have the eyesight for that, though. I was in the 77th Special Forces Group.”

“Isn’t that the one they call the Black Knights?”

“Yes. I was their communications sergeant.”

“Is that how you met the fu – your friend, I mean?”

 “Snoke? No. We met through a mutual acquaintance.” Ben taps two fingers against the scar on his face, where it carves into his jaw. The way it is reflected in the doorknob, it is his most prominent feature. “He introduced himself by saying we could get matching outfits, too.”

“Did you seriously just say his name was _Snoke_? Like, S-N-O-K-E? Really?”

“Yes.”

“That’s what it says on his driver’s license?”

“That’s what he goes by.” Ben lets his hand slide down. “He’s not so bad.”

 “Neither is eating dirt, relatively speaking, but you don’t see many people lining up to do it.”

(He might have asked that same question, about names, except Ben had been so transcendentally drugged out of his mind when he first met Snoke that the attempt to introduce himself as _Ben Solo_ had come out as _Ren Kylo._ Snoke had switched it around to _Kylo Ren_ and made it stick, since he said this inversion sounded more like something out of a stupid science-fiction film.

He never did find it funny, Ben is realizing now, but he let Snoke keep using it anyway because it was better than the alternative.)

“…Did he say something to you, that day?” Ben asks.

“He said he’d like to –” Rey flushes red, although he guesses more in anger than embarrassment. “Never mind. It was really vulgar.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, good. Somebody should be.”

“Are you this forthcoming with everybody? It’s distinctly un-zen of you.”

 “Only with people I’m not able to punch in the jaw. Your friend’s lucky I wasn’t – oh, hold on. I think I’ve got it.” There is a crisp, mechanical click, and his door swings open at a touch. “Ta-da.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Rey stands. So does Ben. “You’re not as much of an asshole as I thought you were, by the way.”

“But I’m still an asshole?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“That’s a conviction we both share, at least.”

He manages to summon up a smile. Rey smiles as well – then she salutes him, collects her locksmith’s kit, and leaves without saying another word.

Ben doesn’t say anything else, either.

He goes into his apartment and stands there without turning on the lights, since the windows have no curtains and enough glow from the streetlamps manages to get in.

Finally, he walks to the sink and washes off the scummy dishes stacked there. He lets hot water run over his sore hands – that’s right, he had pounded the door, why had he thought pounding the door would be helpful? – after he’s done, until his fingers begin to scald. He puts everything away where it belongs.

 He still doesn’t fall asleep that night, naturally, but at least this gets rid of the moldering food smell. He plays through the messages again.

In the morning Ben flips through a phonebook, until he comes to the ‘L’ section of the yellow pages, and by that same afternoon his front door sports a ferociously complicated keyless lock complete with a spring latch and a six-digit entry code. He tapes a note above it, its message written in neat block letters:

“ _Let’s see a partial differential equation get you past this one, you fuck-trumpet.”_

…

On a cold, bright Sunday in mid-March, Ben pauses to inspect that big dent in his wall.

He places his fist inside of it – a perfect fit, naturally – and draws it slowly out again. He leaves the apartment and returns an hour later with a can of plaster, a spackling knife, two sheets of sandpaper and a piece of cheesecloth. If he’s meticulous enough, maybe it won’t be taken out of his security deposit.

(Assuming he ever leaves this place, that is. Which seems unlikely.)

Amidst the scrapes and scratches that follow, while he works, Ben hears another sound coming through the wall.

It’s a series of soft, busy taps, at about ear-level, sequenced into shorter and longer patterns. This is the wall dividing his apartment from Rey’s, Ben realizes – and the taps seem to be international Morse code. Dot-dash-dash, dot-dot-dot-dot, dot-dash, dash. 

 _W-H-A-T,_ she spells out carefully, _D-O-I-N-G?_

Ben slips the spackling knife through his belt loop to respond, recalling those charts and cheat notes he’d studied so he could memorize this back during basic training. Where had she learned it, though? Her grandfather, possibly. The old British pilot named Ben.

 _F-I-X-I-N-G,_ he pauses to insert a proper stop, _W-A-L-L._

There’s a silence. In the spirit of neighborly amiability, he adds, _Y-O-U?_

_S-T-U-D-Y-I-N-G._

Oh. The noise was disturbing her, then. That would explain it.

_S-O-R-R-Y._

Very faintly, through the wooden support beams and the crumbling plaster and the cheap insulation that separates them, he hears what might be a stifled laugh.

 _I-T-S,_ and another stop, _O-K._

She flicks on her radio, after this. The tapping stops.

So Ben finishes patching the hole, rubbing the new plaster flat with the sandpaper and using the cheesecloth to clean up any remaining dust. Paint might look good too, he considers, although he doesn’t know what color he would like it to be.

Snoke knocks on the door, and of course he knows it is Snoke because there’s also cheerful, accompanying entreaty of _“Ren! Ren, you priggish son-of-a-bitch, quit ignoring me,”_ but just then Rey dials up the volume on her radio so loud that it completely drowns him out.

Ben goes off to patch another hole in his bedroom wall, humming to himself while he does.

…

In April, he takes a spiral-bound notebook and a ballpoint pen and sits down to write out everything he can remember enjoying at some point in his life or another.  This is eventually amended to become a more manageable list of everything he can remember doing because he wanted to do it, not because somebody else made him.

The page still remains blank for about an hour, although he reminds himself – there’s a post-it note about this on the cabinet, in fact, another on the refrigerator – to get up and make lunch. He settles on a grilled cheese sandwich between two heels of bread.

(He also stops to water those potted daffodils Rey has gifted him, along with some circuitous but cheerful explanation about belated housewarming presents, and shifts them between windowsills as the sun moves. 

The pot features a smiling bee painted on its side, despite bees lacking the requisite facial muscles for such a task. Ben had wisely withheld this observation.)

After another excruciating thirty minutes, his list reads as follows: _science (string theory?), building (wood/metal?), photography, track/field/running._

Ben reads this over twice, decides it is stupid – not to mention stupidly short, especially for someone his age, as though he hasn’t really changed since he was fifteen years old – and has it crumpled in his fist before he can stop himself.

_(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)_

He spreads the paper flat and pins it to the wall with a thumbtack.

The one pair of sneakers Ben owns are fairly tattered, with laces he’s replaced, but the soles appear good enough following a quick inspection. At sunrise he wills himself through the act of putting on sweatpants, a t-shirt that he grabs without looking, and proceeds to run a loop through the neighborhood that is several blocks in length.  He collapses onto a strip of grass by the parking lot when he gets back, puffing and gasping like a wind-broke horse. His nose drips.

He doesn’t even notice Rey until she’s standing directly above him, a scratched-up polycarbonate helmet on her head and big driving goggles over her eyes. She is framed all around by the color-streaked morning sky.

“Do you need a hand?”

“No.” Ben flings an arm across his face. “I need cardiopulmonary resuscitation.”

“You and the EMTs have fun with that, then. I hear they usually need to break a few ribs.” She cocks her head to one side, pulls down the goggles to squint at him. “Is that a band?”

“What?”

“Your shirt. Is that supposed to be a reference?”

Ben lifts himself upright as far as he can manage, which means he cranes his neck while grimacing in pain. His shirt reads, in bold red letters printed on black, ‘I FIND DARK ENERGY REPULSIVE.’ 

“Oh.” He slumps. Mown grass sticks to his disheveled hair. “No. It’s a very dumb joke.”

“Can I hear it?”

(Briefly, Ben envisions a picture Snoke once made for him. It was drawn on a paper napkin, in red pen, and showed two different arrows – one pointed up, while the other pointed down.

 _“This one represents that specific brand of nerdy talk you get yourself worked up into,”_ Snoke had said, pointing to the upwards arrow, and then his finger had shifted to the downwards arrow sketched beside it. _“And this one represents your chances of ever getting laid by a woman in this lifetime. What’s the mathematical relationship here, Ren?”_

 _“Inverse,”_ he’d answered. 

_“Exactly.”)_

But she’s still staring at him, so Ben swallows to wet his dry throat.

“It’s physics,” Ben says. He raises his hands in gesticulation. Snoke says this makes him look like a lunatic swatting bees, but it makes thinking easier and oftentimes he can’t help himself. “Einstein theorized that empty space possesses its own energy, because of this thing called a cosmological constant, so if space expands then it means more energy can actually be created instead of just re-distributed. Then that energy makes up this dynamic, fluid field, which, uh – it’s related to what we know about how the universe is expanding, essentially. We think dark energy might be what makes it do that.”

“So, you mean dark energy is literally –?”

Rey draws both hands close against her chest, flings them outward in a spreading gesture.  Ben mimics her so that they’ve both got their arms opened wide.

“– Repulsive,” he finishes. “Yes.”

She snorts, slapping a hand over her mouth to disguise the unflattering sound.

“Wow. That really is dumb.”

Ben steeples his own hands atop his chest. He should sit up, since the dew has begun to soak through his clothes: but he likes this deep pressure of the ground beneath his back, and he likes the view it affords him of the lightening sky, and he especially likes the combined, gathering-in effect that these two things have on him together.

“I warned you.”

“But, you know, it kind of makes sense.” Rey takes off the helmet to scratch an itch above her ear. “That could be what people are actually feeling, when they talk about the human energy field. I mean, it’s the whole idea behind shiatsu and nuat thai, and back in the seventies Dolores Krieger studied how you need to –”

She stops herself mid-thought and jams the helmet back on.

“—But I don’t want to be accused of _dithering_ , naturally.”

“No, no.” Now Ben really does get up, swinging himself somewhat unsteadily onto his feet. “It probably makes more sense than whatever I just told you.”

“Probably.” She checks her watch, a clunky digital thing meant to be worn by a man. “Well. Back to the daily grind. Bye.”

Ben waves.

She crosses the parking lot and disappears around a corner. His legs are beginning to cramp, but he still takes the stairs, and takes them down again when he leaves for another run the next morning. It’s excruciating, it burns his lungs like a lit sparkler and winds his muscles up into shortened steel cables, but it leaves him with more or less that same washed-out, emptied-clean feeling he gets from breaking the lightbulbs and cracking his fists through the walls.

 Except it’s less expensive, of course. It won’t require repairs afterwards. It’s somewhat less likely that he’ll actually succeed in hurting himself.

The next week, Ben makes it down to the bay and halfway back again before he gets a blister. He bandages it and runs the next day, as well, and the next and the next and the next. It burns less after some practice, so he adds in sprints to make up for it. 

He also marshals the energy to wash his bedsheets, scrub the shower, mop the floor, replace the missing lightbulbs and throw away his accumulated junk mail, although he keeps a stack of the business envelopes and ties these together with string.

They are all addressed to him in the same tidy handwriting, and they are all unopened.

…

In May, he uses a computer at the city library to fill out thirty online job applications.

There’s a thesaurus at his elbow the whole time, because he quickly finds himself in dire need of euphemisms and periphrases to rationalize the fact that he’s held nothing but sporadic minimum-wage jobs over the past four years. He also needs to spend fifteen minutes or so in an empty upstairs restroom, shredding blank copy paper from the printer into confetti-sized pieces before flushing everything down the toilet.

_(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)_

“Ben Solo,” one interviewer reads. “Are you related to Leia Solo? The senator from California?”

“Yes. She’s my mother.”

“Oh. So all that media coverage, in –”

“Yes.”

He leaves this interview early. They never call him back.

And he receives an inbox full of rejection e-mails, afterwards, which he repeatedly tells himself he shouldn’t read but always does. His thirty-first application goes to a small radio broadcasting station, outside the city, a part-time position –a radar technician, their profile calls it – with no benefits but semi-respectable pay.

He gets the job. 

“Really? Which station?” Rey asks, when they encounter each other down in the mailroom. Ben is in the midst of opening a letter that contains his blank W-4 and related paperwork. “We listen to a radio at the junkyard. I get to be the designated DJ between 3:30 and 4:30.”

She is wearing sandals, so Ben can see she paints her toenails the same vibrant green color as her fingers. The pots on her balcony have become populated with sprouting snap peas, cherry tomatoes, baby carrots, red geraniums and purple verbena and one imperially-minded ivy that seems to grow and spread whenever nobody’s looking. 

Ben, meanwhile, has gotten a haircut. It’s just long enough to brush over his ears.

“91.5,” he answers. “It’s classical, though. Your coworkers might not enjoy it.”

“My grandfather’s a big fan of Gershwin.” She taps him on the right shoulder with her stack of mail, and then on the left shoulder in a vaguely chivalric gesture. “So I’ll like it, at least. Everybody else can go bend themselves over backwards and swallow their own butts. Like that Greek symbol, with the snake? I can’t remember what it’s called. ”

“A ouroboros?”

“Yes, that's it. Thank you. Like a ouroboros.”  

“You’re wasted on physiotherapy, you know. Poetry is clearly your true calling.”

Their afternoon radio host is a blonde British woman named Philomena Samuels, although on air she uses the pseudonym ‘Phasma.’ She rides a motorcycle made of polished silver chrome and could probably bench-press a horse if the desire ever struck her. Feelings toward her among the station personnel range from terror to infatuation.

The manager is a man about Ben’s age named Huxley, like the dystopian novelist, although he goes only by ‘Hux’ or ‘Sir’ to whatever plebeians he stoops to converse with at all. He has defiantly red hair, a sarcastic tone so flat it could smother a fire, and a practiced expression of discreet but unvarying disgust.

Ben arrives at the station fifteen minutes early, four days a week, wearing his cleanest jeans and a black button-down shirt. He keeps their RF system’s equipment in sensible working order and says between ten and twenty words to everyone, collectively, so he’s rather surprised when he gets invited to play cards one Friday night.

“Oh, no, the invitation is simply a front,” Hux drawls, likely in response to Ben’s suspicious expression. “You’ve discovered us. We’re really conspiring to steal one of your kidneys and leave you in a bath of ice water.”

“Matt moved after he switched jobs,” Phasma says, yanking Hux into a playful chokehold that he does not appear to find playful in the slightest. He flails noiselessly while she speaks. “He’s the one who used to come. You need at least three people to have a game worth bothering over. Everyone else we’ve asked is busy – unless you have other plans?”

Ben, in fact, does not.

Hux lives in a Victorian-era duplex house further out along the bay, its rooms occupied by military history books and replica swords and flintlock pistols and a cat named Millicent who is almost as orange and irascible as her owner. Ben arrives holding a bottle of red wine.

“Delas Côtes du Ventoux?” Hux keeps it at arm’s length, gripped by the long neck as though it is a goose he’s been asked to strangle. “I’ve never heard of this particular brand.”

“It’s supposed to be aged in stainless steel.” Ben points to the label. “The clerk said that’s what gives it the plum flavor.”

“Lovely.”

 Hux uncorks the wine bottle, strides to the sink, and empties everything down the drain in one indulgent, festive pour. Phasma goes on arranging chairs and cards as though she hasn’t noticed.

“That cost me fifteen dollars,” Ben says.

“My apologies.” Hux drops the empty bottle into his recycling bin. “You’ll be compensated for your loss.”

Ben has come expecting poker, or blackjack, both of which he was taught to play – to cheat at, really – when he was a child, but then Phasma lays out the deck she’s been shuffling and Ben realizes that they’ve invited him for a game of Cards Against Humanity: and that those champagne flutes on the table are actually filled with sparkling apple cider.

Ah.

“Welcome to the final stage of your employment process,” Hux explains, perching himself on a chair. Millicent leaps into his lap. “It will allow us to conclusively determine whether you’re an insipid and uncreative fool or a psychopath.”

“You’ll have to excuse Hux, I’m afraid. The proctologists haven’t quite been able to dislodge whatever sharp object he’s gotten stuck up his arse.” Phasma offers them each a stack of ten white cards. “I’ll start off as the Czar, if you don’t mind. Are you familiar with this game?”

Ben isn’t, but he wins the very first play with a sentence about masturbating to a dead relative’s ashes.

“Disgusting,” Hux appraises, over the rim of his glass. “Clearly a psychopath.”

Phasma nods in agreement. Ben swirls his cider.

“Should I take that to mean I’m hired, then?”

Phasma and Hux glance at each other before answering, together, “Yes.”

Hux, as it turns out, has been sober for three years – he never developed a taste for beer, though, good lord, he’s not some vulgar Anglo-Saxon peasant. Phasma made money throughout her adolescence and into her early twenties by betting on herself in illegal street fights – why not, if men were making jokes about her anyway? – but had this less-than-illustrious career cut short when someone shattered her clavicle with an aluminum baseball bat. She recovered while serving an eighteen-month prison sentence.

They relate all of this to him in dry, unequivocal tones, arranging their cards on the table, and Ben contemplates making some joke about being the new lowest common denominator – yes, their lives might also require some rearrangement, but at least they can feel secure in the knowledge that they’ll never be _him_ – but decides this would sound very uncharitable.

So he nods, and listens, and asks questions wherever it seems prudent. Occasionally he makes them laugh, or contributes something useful.

“That helmet,” Ben asks Hux, pointing to a case on the high shelf. “Is that an Air Force HGU-15/P? From Vietnam?”

“No.” Hux doesn’t turn around. There is a painstaking order to the way everything in this home is arranged, so he no doubt has the place mapped out in his memory. “The Air Force only made sixteen of those.”

“And then four of those sixteen were modified to have a specialized toxic gas mask, right?”  

“Yes.” Hux’s fingers twitch, as does his left eye. “Have you ever seen one?”

“I own one.” Ben tries to tell himself how this is yet another ridiculous thing to be proud about, because he had nothing to do with it, but the self-sabotage doesn’t work quickly enough. “It was my grandfather’s.”

Hux raises his eyebrows.

“Oh dear,” Phasma admonishes. Millicent has migrated to her lap for additional stroking. “Now you’ll never shut him up.”

This is the most sustained conversation he’s gotten in half a year, so Ben has to excuse himself early because it leaves his mind slack and stretched-out like an old rubber band. A long drive home through the fragrant spring night, as lights appear in all the passing house windows, seems to give him back some elasticity.  

He sits in the parking lot for a while to think.

And one Tuesday afternoon, he convinces Phasma to play the major works of George Gershwin between about 3:15 and 4:05. The hour ends on “Rhapsody in Blue.” He never learns whether Rey heard this or not, since he never asks her about it, but he decides this is all right.

That’s not why he wanted to do it.

…

In June their apartment’s elevator breaks – to the surprise of nobody, by the way – and so Ben finds himself recruited to help Rey wrestle a second-hand desk up seven flights of stairs.

“Can you believe it was just sitting on the curb?” Ben hears her shout from the steps above him. He hopes she can’t see how much he’s sweating with this effort, and decides he should also invest in a pair of dumbbells. “So I thought, wow, what a waste! Right now I do my homework on the floor, but this has great pigeon holes for everything. The finish is bad, in a few places, but I can just scrape that off – and you’ll never guess what I found in the bottom drawer.”

“A shrunken human head,” Ben offers. “Or twenty dollars. Which would be more noteworthy, do you think?”

“Twenty dollars. But it was actually this cool old fountain pen – I’m going to write my grandfather a letter with it, if I can buy the ink.” They stop to rest on the fifth-floor landing. Rey fixes her hair, coming loose in waves around her shoulders. “How do they make shrunken heads, anyway?”

“Easy.” By now, Ben has learned that Rey actually expects an answer to all of the questions she asks him. He’s typically willing to oblige. “They start with a small incision in the back of the head –”

“So they can take out the skull, right? I’ve always thought you’d need to do that first.”

“So they can take out the skull, yes. And then they –”

It requires some innovation, and Rey must remind him several times to lift with his knees rather than his back so he won’t give himself a hernia, but they finally slide the desk through her propped-open apartment door. She doesn’t seem to mind Ben coming in.

He keeps his arms tucked down against his sides to avoid touching anything.

The space is bright and organized and colorful, as he knew it would be. There are even more plants in here than on the balcony, fishbowl terrariums filled with violets and a row of tiny succulents growing inside old bottle corks and another ivy that she’s trained onto a chicken-wire trellis, while the kitchen table is made from several pieces of reclaimed wood she’s nailed together and varnished.

On the wall are two photographs, hung side-by-side.

The first one shows Rey, perhaps fifteen years old, paler and shorter and alarmingly underweight. She sits with her knees together on the stone steps to a large, aged building. She aims a placid expression at the camera. Close beside her is a petite, skinny black woman, wearing a nun’s habit and a rosary and a huge pair of orange-framed glasses that make her eyes resemble those of an owl. The woman has a sly, calculated expression, which informs the world – on no uncertain terms – that she knows exactly what it’s up to.

“That’s Sister Maz,” Rey points out, following his gaze. “I told you about her, didn’t I?”

“Yes. Your innovative linguistic mentor.”

“Yeah, that’s her. She ran the children’s home that took me in after I left my last foster family. She’s the one who helped me find my grandfather when I was sixteen. He’d been living pretty far off the grid, out in Arizona, so he didn’t even know I existed until she got in touch with him – this is him, right here.”

Then Rey turns Ben’s attention towards the second, larger photo, set inside a hand-painted wooden frame. It shows her standing in front of the Grand Canyon, wearing a gaudy sunhat and a red layer of sunburn across her bare shoulders. She is smiling. An older man, trim-waisted and gray-bearded and with deep creases in his face, holds an arm tightly around her and smiles as well.

“You said his name was Ben, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Ben Kenobi.”

“What was he doing out in Arizona?”

“He needed the dry weather, mostly. He’d had to leave the Air Force because he got hurt in a really bad smash-up, so rain and snow always made his joints hurt. I think he wanted the quiet, too.” She rubs imaginary dust off the frame. “We’d drive into Flagstaff once a month so he could visit a physical therapist, though. Her name was Sabé – I remember liking a lot of the things she’d tell him.”

Ben can see his face reflected in the photograph’s glass where he stands behind her, scar and all, so he moves slightly to the left. 

“Such as?”

“She said – well. She said everybody has these, um, these knots, inside themselves. Places where they’d gotten wound up around their pain, whether that was in their muscles or their heads. You can’t see this stuff with your eyes, she’d say, but you can feel it.” Rey does a rather odd thing here, folding her arms so that each hand pulls hard on its opposite shoulder, as though she’s keeping the pieces of something together. The gesture seems unconscious. “Or you can talk to them, and you learn things that way instead – so I think healing is just about how you decide to untangle the knots.”

Now Rey turns toward him and holds out her hands, open-palmed.

“I guess that’s pretty dithering too, huh?”

He wants to look away, but in another moment decides against it.

“Not at all.”

They deliberate for a while and at last decide Rey’s old-new desk should sit beneath a eastward-facing window, which she has left open for an early summer breeze to float through, and Ben dutifully admires the fountain pen she’s discovered. Its steel is carved all over in repoussé etchings, shaped to resemble flowers and vines that will press into the web of her thumb whenever she uses it. She walks him to his front door.

That night, Ben sits with his phone in hand.

He must pause a long time between pushing each button,  so he has to stop and start over again six times in a row. A wave of nausea rolls through him.

_(“…If you weren’t such an irredeemable fuck-up.”)_

“Screw off,” Ben says aloud. “I didn’t ask for your opinion.”

On the seventh attempt, he dials quickly without looking down – instead he keeps his eyes on that plastered-over hole in the wall, which Ben must remind himself he has patched and smoothed and made to look like new again. The phone rings ten times before going to voicemail, and plays an answering message that Ben knows by heart because he is the one who first helped record it.

There is a loud, prompting beep at the end.

_(“…So I think healing is just about how you decide to untangle the knots.”)_

 He closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose, and clears his throat.

“Hi, Mom. It’s, uh.” He purses his lips to stop them from trembling. “It’s Ben. I know it’s late. I’m sorry I didn’t call earlier but, ah – I’ll try again tomorrow.”

He hangs up.

But three minutes later, possibly less, the phone rings.

His hands are shaking so badly that he almost drops the damn thing, but he manages to tighten his grip and press it against his ear by the eighth or ninth ring.  There is a suspended, pressurized silence. And then, hesitantly, coming to him through three thousand miles of telephone wire, he hears his mother ask:

“Ben?”

He starts to cry, and it is several minutes before he can get enough air to speak again.

…


	2. Chapter 2

 ...

One coal-hot evening in late July, Ben feels a familiar pain coiling like barbed wire through the scar on his face and looks out to see black thunderheads piled high above the bay. Lightning flashes inside a cloud while he watches, throwing white reflections on the water.

 Ben taps out ten beats against his palm, as though counting syllable lengths in a line of verse, and then stops when he hears the thunder. About two miles away, then, give or take. Static crackles through the phone that he holds cradled between his neck and shoulder.

“I saw Luke yesterday,” Leia says, from the other end, because Ben has been quiet for several moments. “I told him how you were doing – he said one of his undergraduate students asked if they could review your old research.”

“Did Luke tell them not to bother?”

“No.” There’s a pneumatic creak, as though his mother has eased back in her desk chair. “He told them they could get the backup copies from Dr. Yoda.”

“You mean he hasn’t retired yet? That man must be pushing ninety by now.” Two more flashes of lightning appear, close together like nerve synapses firing. Rain begins to fall. “Maybe all those decades of acerbity have pickled his internal organs.”

Leia laughs quietly.

Ben turns from the window and walks to a narrow hallway closet, tugging twice on a pull-chain that dangles from the bare bulb inside. Its light illuminates a cardboard box that has been duct-taped shut, the scope to a Red Saber M4 tactical rifle, a military-issued black keffiyah scarf with half its hem scorched away, and a large aviation flashlight hanging off a coat hook by its handle strap. 

He takes this down and joggles the switch a few times – and now Leia is the silent one, so Ben must give a slight push instead.

“How has Chewie been?”

“He’s been himself, mostly.” Leia shuffles papers, staples something together. “The groomers never take me seriously when I warn them that he bites. I’m always treated to the same patronizing explanation about how docile Wheaten Terrier crossbreeds are, but I try to tell them that they need to –”

“– Let the Wookie win,” Ben finishes.

His mother gives another subdued, out-of-practice laugh, as Ben had hoped she would, and there is a smile in her voice when they hang up several minutes later. He erases three messages on his answering machine, all of which are from Snoke.

 (They talk several times a week now, Ben and Leia, although their conversations have only just begun to take on a certain fragile, solicitous ease. He recently purchased a two-way plane ticket scheduled for the week of Christmas and has e-mailed the confirmation receipt to his mother as proof.

 _“See?”_ his message had read. _“I’m not bluffing this time.”_

He’s also started reading those letters Leia sent him, one at a time as though they are rations. He slits them open along their sides with a penknife and bends each envelope before he does, determining whether or not it contains a photograph.

Ben usually sets these letters aside.)

More raindrops scatter against the window, and then it all comes down at once in an abrupt, sighing release. The wind picks up. Another lightning flash throws skeletal shadows across the wall. Ben continues his counting while he slaps kitchen drawers open at random, searching for matches – he finds only an unopened package of birthday candles, which he throws away  – and has gotten down as low as five one-thousandths when the lights in his apartment flicker.

He pauses.

They dim and flutter a second time, as though some large moth is beating its wings against them, and then they all go out. So does every light from the street below, every light on the block.

And the flashlight is right there in his hands, of course, but Ben forces himself to wait. Darkness collects around him, making the room smaller and more private, and the noise of rain rushes in to fill those blacked-out places inside his mind. 

_(“Dammit, kid, listen to me. If you don’t want to talk, fine. You don’t even have to look at me. But you can at least do me one favor and listen for five minutes –”)_

There is a smarting rap of knuckles on the front door. Ben flinches.

“Knock-knock!”

He considers clicking on the flashlight, except he’s tripped over everything in this apartment often enough – and observed it through such falsely euphoric, kaleidoscopic lenses – that he could likely navigate it blindfolded. He counts his steps to the door.

“Who’s there?”

“You.”

Ben deliberates over his response. After a deep, steadying breath, which he holds for the time between yet another lightning strike and its drumroll reply, his pounding heart subsides.

“No, there’s nobody here by that name,” he calls, one hand braced against his chest. “You must have the wrong apartment.”

“Well, th – what? Hey!” Something bangs into the outside wall. “I’ve been saving that joke for a week, you ninny-hammering laser-brain.”

When Ben finally clicks on his flashlight and opens the door, he finds Rey standing there in long-hemmed denim shorts and a white t-shirt that fits her about as well as a collapsed tent. A very large sunflower decorates its front. In her hip pocket she carries the same little twist-top flashlight she once used to peer through his lock.

“What is it?”

“Would you happen to have a pair spare of – bollocks. I knew I was going to do that.” Rey squints into the beam Ben holds aimed at her face. “Would you have a _spare pair_ of D-cell batteries I could borrow? I’ll pay you back, I promise.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Ben drums his fingers against the doorframe. “That sort of charitable deed doesn’t strike me as something a laser-brain would do – how is that an insult, anyway? It sounds like a laudatory statement about one’s focus and mental acuity.”

“I’m not talking about some quadrillion-watt planet-destroying laser, obviously.” Rey spreads her hands apart expansively, shrinks them back together again until they are almost touching. “I’m talking about one of those dinky little laser-pointers you can use to torment cats.”

“You might’ve specified.”

Ben reaches out to take the flashlight from her and then turns away, leaving the door open behind him. He expects she will remain out in the hallway, because he knows one sort of darkness is more or less the same as any other, but he looks over his shoulder to see that Rey has followed him inside.

At least it’s cleaner than it used to be. And she can’t see too much of it, at any rate. So it’s all right.

Ben occupies himself with opening and closing drawers again, glancing over their contents – broken pencil stubs, dried-out pens, loose change, sticker-paper from the backs of adhesive bandages – until he finds a new eight-pack of batteries. 

Rey goes to press her hand against the window. Condensation forms instantly around her fingertips, ghostly white, spreading outwards from beneath her fingertips. There is another lashing of rain, another whip-crack of thunder. The sides of their apartment building groan with the wind.

“I’ve always loved these,” she says.

“What, thunderstorms?”

Ben tears the package open with his teeth. Her flashlight has been decorated with stickers, of the sparkly variety, so he must scratch these off to open the battery case.

 “Yeah. The ones out in Arizona are like being inside a beating heart. There’s so much sound – you can never feel like you’re alone, during a thunderstorm.” She exhales, long and low, fogging the glass with her breath, and uses her thumb to trace the outline of a daisy. It covers up her reflection. “I lived in this one place that got about a quarter-inch of rain per year. I couldn’t believe how much I missed it.”

 “Where?”

“Hmmm?”

“Where did you live?” Ben removes the old batteries and checks their terminals for corrosion before he snaps the new ones into place.  “The place where it never rained?”

“Oh. Nowhere.” Rey crosses her arms over one another in that same peculiar, self-embracing way. “Well, figuratively speaking, it was nowhere. It was actually this city called Jakku.”

And now Ben has to frown, because he happens to know Jakku.

He’s studied it on maps, congressional and aeronautical alike. It is in San Bernardino County, about fifty miles from Barstow, in more or less the geographic middle of the Mojave Desert.  There are no libraries, no schools, no oceans or ponds or green, soft, blooming things. He tries to imagine Rey in such a place, against its backdrop of parched earth, rusted metal, coarse creosote bushes and flat horizons so endless they swallow all sense of perspective.

This serves to make him frown deeper.

“Jakku? As in Jakku Junction, California?”

Rey turns to stare at him. Her posture is off-balanced, startled, like a young child caught in some forbidden action.

“You know it,” she says.

“Yes. That –” Ben very nearly calls it a _junkyard_ , until he recalls his damning comment about dismal trash heaps and manages to bite his tongue. “That place has been going downhill since BNSF closed their branch line. Why would a social worker place you there?”

“Uh.”

She purses her lips. Ben notes how the rippling, rainy evening light from outside makes her white shirt and her skin both turn silver-blue where she stands. Besides his flashlight, which has remained tucked beneath one arm, Rey is the only bright thing in this whole blacked-out room.

And she could tell Ben that he is being intrusive, that he should get out of her head, but then she sidesteps away from his window and walks toward him through the dark.

“All right.” Rey props her elbows on a kitchen chair-back, hitches one foot over its spindle. “So I haven’t been completely honest, technically – I mean, I haven’t outright _lied_ , but I guess the truth depends on your particular point of view. That’s something my grandfather likes to say.”

Surreptitiously, so as not to make any noise, Ben sets her repaired flashlight down on the table. Rey does not reach for it.

“I left my last foster home when I was thirteen. That was the sterling-quality asshole, the guy who kept locking me out? Then I went to stay with Maz and the Sisters of Kanata when I was fifteen.” She puffs out her cheeks, gives a gusty exhale, and continues. “In between I ran away and lived inside this old AT-AT freighter car at the Jakku Junction Railyard Depot. The police finally picked me up for shoplifting a candy bar. I knew stealing it was stupid, but you wouldn’t believe how monotonous dumpster-diving gets after a while.”

Ben balances his own flashlight upright on its handle – full of old nicks and scratches, every one of which he knows the explanation for – and it spreads gray light across the ceiling, throughout the room. The shadows become curved and oblong, as though they are inside a bowl or a pair of cupped hands.

The police, he repeats to himself. Which means they might not have found her, otherwise, or at least not for a very long time.

So atop his withering, crumbling vision of Jakku, he must interpose an image of Rey – not Rey as she is now, the Rey she has become, but maybe Rey as she appears in that photograph with Sister Maz, as thin and tightly-wound as stripped wire – elbow-deep in some stranger’s trashcan.

 And Ben realizes he is angry, at this thought, although the anger seems to provide a stable surface tension which bears him up rather than yanking him under.

“How could it have possibly taken them a year to find you?” he asks, his voice on a short tether. “Didn’t anyone report you missing?”

“Well, yeah. But I ended up in Jakku because I’d pinned this piece of string to a map and decided I’d run however far I could stretch it. Anything was better than Plutt.” Rey rubs her hands over one another, kneading the bones and tendons as thoughtlessly as though they belong to somebody else. “I must’ve hitchhiked and train-hopped about two hundred miles to get there. It just took bad luck that long to catch up with me.”

“Somebody still should’ve been able to trace you. They weren’t looking hard enough.”

“It wasn’t too bad. Like, I made this cool staff, out of metal pipe? Towards the end I got quick enough to kill lizards with it. I know it’s cliché, but they did taste a lot like chicken – oh, and the airfield! There was this abandoned army airfield, nearby, with a Lockheed Vega 5B someone had left behind. I’d break into the cockpit and pretend I was Amelia Earhart. Or Sally Ride, if I was feeling more ambitious.”

Rey looks up from her hands to smile at him.

The lightning and thunder have rolled past, overhead, although the rain continues its steady hiss. Ben considers once more the bird feeder and the sparrows, the trailing ivy plants and the various potted flowers, the writing desk and the highlighted textbooks and the folk music and those two pictures hung together on her wall.

_(“…So I think healing is just about how you decide to untangle the knots.”)_

And Ben does not intend to speak his next thought aloud, but for whatever reason he hears himself say it anyway.

 “It must have been very lonely, though.”

“Sometimes.” Rey finally reaches forward to pick up her flashlight. “A lot, actually. I didn’t exactly want to leave, but it’s like your brain starts turning these, uh, these circles, I guess, inside your head, when you’ve got nobody to talk to. I made a doll out of scrap canvas and named it Captain Raeh. Like my name, sort of – an actual doll! I couldn’t believe myself. I hadn’t played with dolls since I was four.”

Ben is silent.

Rey straightens her back, easing her elbows off the chair. Her lips button together in concentration and work themselves side to side before she speaks again, with a delicate deliberation.

“You know, I got interrogated for six hours after the police found me. They gave me something to eat, which was good, even if what I really wanted was some toothpaste and a flush toilet – but I don’t think a single person thought of asking me about whether I’d been lonely or not.”

A leaden weight sinks from Ben’s throat down into his stomach. He has hardly said anything to her, and even this was apparently too much. 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“No, no. It’s okay. It would’ve been nice to hear.” The flashlight flares to life in her hands. Rey waggles the beam at his face. “So, thank you.”

Ben glances down at himself to tug a loose thread on his shirt. It is blue chambray, since everything darker-colored is currently dirty. He has gradually started rolling his sleeves up again, rather than keeping them buttoned to the cuffs out of former, lying habit. The scar on his face twists inward once more.

“You’re welcome, then.” 

“I should be the one apologizing, honestly. I’ve done all the talking here.” She waves the light around and takes a step backwards. “I’ll let you get back to your business.”

He glances up.

“Wait. Tell me the joke.”

Rey stops. “What joke?”

“Before. When you knocked.” He spreads out both hands, pantomiming a barrier between them. “You said you’d been saving a joke. I’ll make an attempt not to spoil it, this time.”

“Oh! All right, great. Here we go.” Rey bites her lip, clears her throat. “Knock-knock.”

Ben tries to compose his expression, for dramatic effect, but something seems to burst out of her and catch onto him like the sparks from a burning pine knot. His left brow quirks. A corner of his mouth twitches.

“Who’s there?”

“You.”

“You, who?”

“Well, there’s no need to holler, Ben,” Rey answers, nearly fluorescent with self-satisfied, delighted accomplishment. “I’m standing right here.”

Ben frowns, tilts his head, and has partially worked out an explanation that could involve either a Platonic creation myth or Freudian theories of uncanny egoistic doubling when it occurs to him: _yoo-hoo._

He laughs.

The sound is broad and ungainly, so startling that his immediate reaction is to hide it behind a hand, except this does not work because his laugh also happens to be very loud. Ben feels it deep through the muscles of his stomach and sides, like an ache, so he looks down again and keeps that hand pressed over his smiling mouth – he tries pressing with the back of his fingers, instead, turning his wrist – until the laughter stops.

“That’s, uh. That’s atrocious.” He coughs. “I’m honored to have been its inspiration.”

“Huh?”

Rey blinks, as if he’s caught her off guard for the second time this evening. She still has her flashlight aimed toward him, making it difficult to discern her expression through the interrogatory glare, but he can tell she is not smiling. Not exactly.

“You’re right.” He thumps the flat space below his throat, warm beneath his hand. “That was certainly worth saving for the right occasion.”

“Ah. Right,” Rey says, inattentively, like someone absorbed in rewinding a spool of thread. She scratches at the back of her leg with one bare foot, its green-painted toes all curled up. “Right. Sure. No problem.”

When she doesn’t leave, still, Ben understands that he has not quite played the proper host in relieving his guest of her mannerly obligations. He gestures toward the door.

“Good night.”

“Yeah,” Rey answers. “You too.”

With somewhat baffled haste – she’s relieved, Ben guesses, to go – she shows herself out.

Then the door closes, and the quiet falls around him somehow different than before. That flower Rey has drawn on the glass begins to drip, and in a flicker of whimsy Ben exhales over it – his breath is larger, though, and it rediscovers her five vanished fingerprints as well – so that the picture might be preserved a bit longer. He serves himself a bowl of corn flakes for dinner, since the milk will go bad if he allows it to sit in a warming refrigerator. The rain lessens and lessens until it goes silent. The electricity does not come back on.

He considers returning the aviator flashlight to its hook, gets as far as switching it off and heading for the closet door, but then changes his mind and lies down atop a clean-sheeted bed. With solemn, solitary effort, Ben settles the flashlight against his chest.

They’d kept this in a water-tight steel box, he remembers. Underneath the copilot’s seat.

They had stored it alongside a navigational compass, four emergency flares, a package of candy bars, and a first-aid kit perpetually short on ammonium nitrate cold-packs because Ben would always bang his forehead on the fuselage’s interior. He once spent three days memorizing air traffic signals, practicing them with this flashlight he holds now, despite being told such regulations were to be treated more like loose guidelines.

_(“– I really don’t care what kind of neck-deep shit you’ve gotten yourself into. And look, I’ve never pretended to be a candidate for sainthood myself. You know that. So I’m telling you now, this is nothing we can’t work on together – ”)_

Ben clicks the switch again.

He watches the white light turn a deep, glowing red when he lays his hand across it.

…

In August an oscillator at the radio station breaks – no, he clarifies over the phone, not the _calcinator_ , what would thermal decomposition have to do with any of this? – and so Ben stays four hours later than usual to repair it. The problem is a defective output amplifier, which in the end he decides to simply replace with a newer transistor model. He is informed at the outset that he will not receive overtime pay.

Phasma stays late, as well, since Hux cannot trust anybody else with the studio’s master keys. She steals a leather-upholstered ergonomic chair from his office and completes a crossword puzzle while she waits. 

“All right, here’s another.” Phasma flings off her white stiletto heels. She stores her motorcycle boots and studded jacket in a duffel bag. “The clue is, _‘A form of Japanese bodywork based on traditional Chinese medicine, credited to Tokujiro Namikoshi.’_ Seven letters.”

Ben turns a dial on his soldering iron. Copper wires smolder like extinguished cigarettes as he fuses them together. He’s burned his fingers three times now, each one as unexpected and malicious as a hornet’s sting, and each time he has wanted to rip out the power cord with a violent jerk.

Instead Ben has drawn a measured breath, as though he’s on a long-distance run, then has forced it out and breathed in again and so on until he reaches the count of ten. Each time he feels something unbraid within him, and the feeling passes.

He cranes his neck to shout through the equipment room’s open door.

“Which letters do you already have?”

“The first one is an ‘s.’” Phasma wheels herself closer. She has adjusted the chair’s seat and armrests to suit someone approximately eight feet tall. “The fifth might be a ‘t _._ ’”

“Huh.” Ben pushes hair off his forehead. “Is it ‘shiatsu’? S-H-I-A-T-S-U?”

“Wait, let me see – yes, that fits. Brilliant.”

“Don’t thank me.”

“It’s a compliment, dear, not a hot potato – oh, and what about this next one? _‘Poison used in the attempted assassination of Rasputin.’_ Seven letters again, nothing filled in. Was it arsenic? I wanted to put _‘hemlock,’_ but that was Socrates.”

Ben doesn’t know either. They leave this one blank.

He takes the long way home, glancing every now and then at an amber-colored sunset in his rearview mirror, and gets back to the apartment complex around 8:00. He emerges from the stairwell to discover Rey paused before his door, hands behind her back as though she’s waiting. She wears a sundress whose yellow skirt reminds him of a dandelion.

“Ah-ha! There you are!” Rey turns when she hears him bang against the exit door’s crash bar. “Are you allergic to nuts?”

Ben briefly imagines Phasma squeaking around in that now-brobdingnagian chair, and the aneurysm Hux is likely to have when he sits down at his desk tomorrow morning.

“My workmates would be dangerous company if I was,” he answers, sidling past her to reach for the door handle. The air around her smells like orange blossom perfume. “Unless that was another joke I just ruined.”

“I’d say you improved it.” She steps aside to let him through. “But seriously, are you?”

“No. Why?”

“An old friend of mine stopped by to visit. I made this almond coffee cake that didn’t turn into a complete disaster.” She jerks one thumb over her shoulder, which makes the clay-beaded bracelets on her wrist clack together. “Would you like a piece?”

For a faltering second, Ben translates this to mean she will bring him some leftovers wrapped in tinfoil – but then he notes the pointed finger, as additional supporting evidence, and it occurs to Ben that Rey is inviting him to eat in her apartment. 

“I suppose it sounds non-lethal enough.” 

“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far.” Rey winks. “They say almonds are excellent for covering up the smell of cyanide.”

(Ah, he thinks. That’s it. C-Y-A-N-I-D-E. He’ll have to tell Phasma when he sees her.)

Ben leaves his bag right where he drops it and spends several minutes caught in a rudderless, adolescent indecision, fingers moving to unbutton the shirt he wears for work – there’s something sage-green in his closet, Ben thinks, freshly pressed and with the tags still on it – before common sense drops its matronly hands onto his shoulders.

He tucks a loose shirt-tail beneath his belt again.

But he still sweeps a comb through his hair, one-two-three strokes above each ear, and then meets his gaze in the tarnished bathroom mirror. A fluorescent lightbulb deepens the creases around his eyes, though as of yet Ben has not found any silver creeping through the black of his hair. He knows exactly what – and who – he will look like when this happens. 

When Ben slips into Rey’s apartment, a black man in his early twenties is taking coffee mugs out of the cabinet.  He wears a t-shirt and a patched bomber jacket that is as care-worn and well-used as a rawhide baseball glove. He hurries to shake hands with three mugs looped over his fingers. On his extended right wrist, Ben sees the very top edge of a somewhat faded tattoo.

“Finn,” the man says, by way of introduction, and must look up considerably while he speaks. “And you’re Ben, right? Jesus. You’re a lot bigger than I pictured you.”

“Disappointment usually is, I’m afraid.”

“Nice one.” He gives Ben’s hand a final, cheerful pump. “I think you’re the first person I’ve tried that with who hasn’t just been like, _‘that’s what she said.’_ ”

Rey turns from the kitchen counter to fling a dish towel at Finn’s head. Without looking, he steps nimbly aside to avoid it.

Ben must position his legs at awkward angles to get himself into the third chair Rey has brought out for him – not as bad as that cramped desk in junior high, though, when an aggressive growth spurt forced him to sit with one knee up near his ear like a monkey – but otherwise they all fit at that round table she’s created from three different cross-grained sections of wood.

Finn speaks with the energized, purposeful economy of someone who prefers accomplishing things in fours and fives rather than ones and twos. He lives three hours north along the interstate, near Yavin Harbor in Maine, but is traveling south to an overnight conference hosted by the NPRC. He works full-time as a high school paraprofessional and has recently been asked to become the faculty adviser for a proposed mixed martial arts club, although he has diplomatically suggested that his students revise the dumbass name.

“What did they want to call it?” Ben asks.

“I don’t even know.” Finn clinks a spoon around his coffee mug. “I think it was ‘the Hosnian High Stormtroopers.’ Yeah, see how fast the school board slaps that one down – but they had the matching uniforms planned out and everything.”

Rey lays her coffee cake before them in the meantime. She has provided mismatched plastic plates and butter knives, but no forks, so Ben lifts a modest slice with one hand. His other hand hovers just below, opened to catch falling crumbs while baked-brown almond slivers crackle between his teeth. The cake smells like cinnamon and vanilla and nutmeg.  Powdered sugar sticks to his fingers, which Ben turns his head decorously aside to lick away, but from the edge of his eye he sees Rey crinkle her nose in amusement.

(Unless that is veiled disgust, of course. Ben doesn’t do it again.)

“And what about that helicopter pilot?” Rey asks, drawing a sip from her hibiscus tea. She boinks her eyebrows at Finn. “The one who flies rescues for the Coast Guard? Any progress on that project, yet?”

“Oh. Uh, it’s good.” Finn nods, mostly to himself. “Things are really good.”

“You promised you would have a better picture to show me this time.” Now she swivels her attention towards Ben. “Listen to this, it’s like something out of a Hallmark film – Finn always rides the late train home, and for about a month his only other fellow passenger is The Actual Most Beautiful Man in the World, until one day Finn happens to glance over and see that the guy has left behind his ja–”

“Here. Here.” Finn holds out a picture on his phone. “Lord have mercy.”

The image shows a slightly older man, maybe Italian or Latino, posed in front of a single-engine plane. He has on a jacket that matches Finn’s – no, in fact, it is the same jacket entirely – and holds a very orange, somewhat portly corgi dog in his arms. The man’s complexion is so golden, his hair so improbably well-styled, that Ben must check twice to ascertain it’s not something from a magazine photoshoot.

“Holy crap-cannoli,” Rey remarks.   

Finn seems nonplussed by this newest turn of phrase. Quite likely he’s grown accustomed to them, a feat Ben did not think was possible.

“I told you.”

“No, you told me he was _‘classically handsome.’_ You didn’t explain that _‘classic’_ literally meant you were dating a Greek god.”

“You would’ve made some wise-ass remark about which god I meant.” Finn strains his voice into a falsetto and stretches his vowels. _“‘Are you dating the god of the underworld, then? Should we expect the arrival of autumn to be at all affected?’_ ”

“Shut up. What’s the dog’s name?”

“Bartholomew Bernadine the Eighth, BB-8 for short. He’s not actually eighth in line for anything, though. I asked – Poe decided it would sound distinguished.”

“Very charming.”

Ben has kept quiet, staring at that small aluminum-bodied plane in the picture’s background. It should seat about four people, with a steerable tailwheel and a characteristically enlarged dorsal fin, and he has a very strong suspicion that it runs on an O-470-A 225 horsepower engine: although with several modifications, and an extremely prayerful mindset, he also suspects it can carry an IO-520 engine that runs up to 300.

(They had needed to take off along a river, once, outside of Fort Simpson, because the cleared field wasn’t long enough and the runway was all broken up with frost heaves.  Pontoons mounted to their undercarriage had sprayed white jets of water as they skimmed the river’s mirror-flat surface.

Then Ben had covered his face with his hands, but through a crack between his fingers he had watched their left wing scythe off the spindle-thin top to a pine tree.)

Hesitatingly, Ben taps the screen of Finn’s phone.

“This plane – is that a Falcon M1?”

“Yeah, you know, I think he told me it was,” Finn says. “Not an original model, though. It’s some kit version one of his friends built. Why? Is that a big deal?”

“Are you kidding?” Rey snatches the phone from him. “The Falcon M1 is practically the gold standard in general aviation. I mean, every pilot in Alaska and Canada combined would probably slit a throat to get their hands on one. Like, there’s this famous bush pilot supply route, up in the Northwest Territories. People are always trying to set new records for it – the Kettle Run, it’s called? No, maybe it’s the Kestrel Run. I think the fastest time so far is fourteen hours.”

(The Kessel Run, Ben silently corrects, and from the deepest roots of his brain he can still hear the voice accompanied by its curling lip.

 _“Twelve hours.”_ )

He looks at Finn again.

“What sort of helicopter does he fly? For the Coast Guard?”

“An X-Wing.” Finn might narrow his eyes here, reading something that Ben knows must be showing on his face, but if he does then Finn also has the good grace to ignore it. “He’s flown pretty much everything. He’d probably try to pull some kind of Icarus-level shit if I didn’t talk him out of it.”

“Sound advice,” Ben says. “I don’t think wax wings are in accordance with the FAA’s current safety codes.”

Finn guffaws as he pockets his phone again, and Rey swats him playfully on the arm.

“I told you,” she says.

Rey speaks next about her patients in supervised therapy training, all of whom she seems to remember in attentive, lively detail because she encourages them to talk whenever she works: old athletes, new mothers, children with immune disorders, geriatric patients, and one man who bears multiple bullet wounds from the time he spent employed as a crime boss’s bounty hunter. He was not, he has admitted to her, terribly skilled at his job.

Ben half-consciously spins a butter knife between his fingers while he listens, because it is less distracting for other people than bouncing his leg, at least until Finn gestures at him.

“You pick that up in the circus or something?”

“CQC training at Fort Starkiller,” Ben says, halting the knife against a forefinger. “So, close enough.”

“Uh-huh, sure. Prove it.”

At Finn’s jocoserious behest, and Rey’s dubious permission, Ben throws the knife with one precise snap of his wrist and sends its dulled blade into Rey’s corkboard. It lands quivering amongst her neon-colored memos, her thumbtacks, and the pushpins upon which she hangs her keys.

Ben is more impressed than his spectators. There was a time when he could stick a combat knife dead-center into a target, fifteen feet away, but it has been years since his patience and his hands were both steady enough at the same time to attempt it. Rey applauds, a genteel opera-house clap.

“Not bad, man.” Finn brings the knife back to him, holds it forth handle-first. “What other tricks do you know?”

And as Ben reaches out, as he considers his response, he sees upon closer examination that the half-hidden tattoo on Finn’s wrist is a symbol. It stands outlined against a field of black ink and resembles an opened bear trap.

His fingers close around the knife.

 “A few,” Ben says, after a pause that carries on a second longer than it should. “I’ll let you know when I think of them.”

“All right, all right.” Rey rises from her chair. “Can I trust you two to keep this place in one piece while I go to the bathroom? No holes in the wall, please.”

Finn moves to reclaim his seat, doffing an imaginary hat. “No promises.”

They watch her flounce around the corner, and when Ben looks over again he can see there is a guarded, proleptic set to Finn’s shoulders. Both of them take long sips from their coffee.

“So.” Ben sets his mug down first. He watches his reflection waver on the coffee’s surface. “How do you know Rey?”

Finn doesn’t blink.

“Do you want the real story, or the one I made up on my way here in case you asked? Your choice. The made-up one comes with a song and dance number.”

Ben glances down at those careless blisters on his fingertips, at the forearms exposed by his rolled-up sleeves.  The skin there has become colored and warm again, but he can recall a morning last year when he woke up with the numbed-cold left hand of a corpse and the bemused realization that his vein had collapsed.

And the tattoo’s ink is fading, Ben tells himself. It has not been touched up in years, unlike an identical one he might compare it to. That should count for more than anything else, whatever else that is.

“Tell me whichever one you think Rey would prefer,” Ben answers. “I know she likes music.”

Finn smiles openly at this, his posture going slack as though a knot has been cut in two, and he takes another slice of Rey’s coffee cake.

“We met at D’Qar Juvenile Detention Center,” he says, without further pause. “Our case files were one digit apart – hers was FN-2188, I think? Mine was FN-2187. We broke out together and stole a truck.”

Ben nods as though he has been told they sat next to each other in class.

“What brought you both to that juncture?”

“I needed somebody who could do a decent hot-wiring job – I was kind of in a hurry to skip town. And Rey needed somebody who actually knew how to drive the damn thing, since her legs weren’t long enough.”  Now Finn leans forward, so Ben obliges by leaning forward as well. It would feel very serious, except for the fact that Finn is talking through a mouthful of cake. “I mean, I wasn’t a very _good_ driver, but I couldn’t exactly tell her that then and there. You get me?”

Ben nods again. After vacillating on what to do with his hands, he sets them atop the table as though it is a secretary’s desk.

“And Rey, she’d gotten brought in because the police found her squatting out in this, uh –”

“– Railroad car. The AT-AT in Jakku.”

“Yeah. Fuck that place, right? They were waiting to have a social worker relocate her.” Finn takes another bite. “But she told me she wasn’t going back into foster care unless they chopped off her all limbs and dragged her there by the neck – Rey doesn’t beat around the bush so much as she douses it in gasoline and sets it on fire.”

“I’ve noticed.”

“So, we decided it would be a good meeting of minds.” Finn scratches his throat. “We actually got through two or three counties before they caught us with a road block.”

Neither of them hears the approaching sound of footsteps, and so they both jolt when Rey claps her hands down around Finn’s chair. She tilts it backwards, onto its rear legs, peering down into his face with a mock frown.

“They caught _me_ , you mean – Finn probably would’ve gotten away if he hadn’t turned back around to help me.” She eases Finn down again but does not move her hands. “We were running through this big field after we’d abandoned the truck. I twisted my ankle in a dumb gopher hole.”

“I just looked back and saw you go down. I thought they’d shot you.” He glances between Rey and Ben. “I thought they’d shot her.”

Ben raises his eyebrows in alarm. Rey gives a dismissive wave.

“Well, they ended up tasering us both, either way. That was pretty fun.” She slides into her own seat again, propping her chin on one hand. She carries a freshened cloud of perfume about her. “In retrospect, we could’ve chosen a getaway vehicle with a slightly less memorable license plate.”

“TR-8R? Probably.” Finn tries and fails to suppress a smile. “You should’ve seen the fight she gave them, though. She kicked this one poor bastard right in the head – I didn’t think a human being’s legs went that high, but when they grabbed her by the arms she got him so hard I think the sides of his brain swapped.”

“Stop.” Rey jabs at Finn’s toes with her heel. Finn does a near-perfect split to avoid her. “It wasn’t that impressive. You were a fairly tough customer yourself.”

“No, I’m serious. Officer 007, right? Yeah, that was him. I bet that guy woke up the next day and wondered why he was suddenly left-handed.”

Rey and Finn both laugh, and Ben smiles. He has no right to do more, because he can tell this story’s harder edges have softened only because it has been passed between them so often. 

Eventually, Finn looks down into his emptied mug. 

“I was lucky, though, matching taser-stamps aside. I would’ve been eighteen in about two months, and then that would’ve been a whole different story.” He scowls. “And I was lucky they granted me clemency for being an informant – first time I get brought along on a drive-by, and I go turn myself in the very next day. So much for selected career paths, right?”

He points at Ben here, and there is another glimpse of the tattoo.

“Listen. If anybody ever mentions some shit about the First Order to you, whatever it is, you keep yourself a solid ten miles clear of it. That is some DEFCON-1 levels of bad news right there. I am talking scorched fucking earth – they helped relocate me twice, after that big bust. Are you hearing this?”

(He had been sitting atop a flight of cement steps, hadn’t he? Ben must think. Yes, yes. That was it.

He’d been seated on the very top step of a building whose address he did not remember later, breathing the humid night air, while an arc-sodium porch light threw his shadow long and thin over the alleyway below. His nerves had been sparkling with adrenalin, a pulse throbbing in his throat, one of his knuckles split because he’d knocked out some man’s teeth – two molars, lead fillings and all, striking the floor like spilled coins.

Ben had gotten a bloody nose in exchange, but he’d sat there and let the blood dry to a black crust without cleaning it. Why bother? There hadn’t been any pain.

Then a door had whined open behind him, and another long shadow appeared alongside his.

 _“Like I said, nice scar,”_ the man had told him, prodding his tongue into the places where his teeth had been several minutes earlier. _“You got a name to go with it?_ ”)

Finn is still looking at him.

Through a window screen, Ben hears the ringing of wind chimes Rey has hung up next to her bird feeder. The chimes are made from old wheel gears, bent spoons and steel pipe fittings, all of which she has carried home from the junkyard and scrubbed clean until they shone.

 “Yes,” Ben says. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

“And after that,” Rey rejoins, nudging Finn’s hand with hers, “after that, we lost track of each other, but before I went to live in Arizona I’d asked Sister Maz to tell anyone who came looking for me where I’d gone. Then every month I’d go pick up our mail at the post office, and there’d always be a letter from Finn there waiting for me.”

_(“No, ‘Snoke.’ S-N-O-K-E. Like ‘John-a-Nokes,’ get it?”_

_“That’s not a real name,”_ Ben had answered, voice full of ferocious superiority, because sound and color and light all felt like grindstones against the fine-sharpened edge of his mind. _“That’s an archaic legal term from Sir Walter Scott. It’s like calling yourself ‘John Doe.’”_

_“So I guess that makes us a regular pair of nobodies, then. Right? Best company there is. Being a somebody never works out in your favor, I’ve discovered – but I probably don’t need to tell you that, do I? Not with a face like that. Good to meet you, Kylo Ren.”)_

“Rey would send me back the weirdest packages.” Finn’s mood swings up again. “Like, rocks, and all these different wildflowers she’d labeled with their scientific names. One time there was this rattlesnake skin about eight goddamn feet long. I almost had a heart attack when I opened the box.”

“Is that hedgehog cactus I mailed you still alive?”

“Peanut? Yeah. Peanut’s doing well.” 

(Kylo Ren had stared at Snoke’s offered hand, at a gaping black and white symbol on its wrist, while insects flew up and wheeled close and were immolated inside that bright-hot lamp with its false sunlight.

Finally, Ren had reached out.

 _“Likewise.”_ )

Rey and Finn go on talking, close together and laughing at things the other has not yet said, every once in a while pausing to ask Ben a question or to answer one he’s asked in turn. The space around them seems sealed tight, as though a strong wind would need to bend its course around it, and Ben feels a flattening heaviness lower itself onto his heart.

But he does not want to spoil this scene in his memory – this moment colored with the smells of spiced cake and the sound of wind chimes and the texture of trusting happiness – by threading it through with his own regrets, so he holds his breath and looks at his watch until five seconds pass.

He exhales.

Except Finn takes this gesture as a subtle cue, apparently, since he had planned to linger here until he could be sure that the early evening – the slackers – and the later evening – the over-achievers and night workers – rush hours had both passed. He gathers his things, not before displaying his borrowed coat’s various patches, and then goes to the door. He and Rey perform a ten-step secret handshake, which culminates in them both spitting sincerely onto their hands and smacking their palms together. Finn and Ben exchange a parting nod instead.

“It was nice meeting you,” Finn says. “Remind Rey to keep out of trouble.”

Rey makes a face at him.

“I doubt she’d listen if I tried – I plan on seeing that song and dance number eventually, though,” Ben warns. “Don’t think you’ve been given a pass.”

Finn executes a series of tap-dance moves as he strolls away down the hall, and his laughter echoes off the stained wallpaper and throughout the narrow stairwell long after he is gone from sight.  Rey sets about cleaning up, thought only once the sound fades completely. Before Ben can stop himself – Leia’s lessons on guest etiquette have worked their way into his marrow, he still knows which side of the plate a salad fork should be set on – he is at the sink and running water for dishes.

The soap smells like grapefruit, and the coarse sponge is shaped like a starfish. Stacked up in order of size are the small plates, the knives, the pan and the mixing bowl and the spoons and the measuring cups for baking, and their three empty mugs in a line. One carries the faint impression of Rey’s cherry-red lipstick on its rim.

Ben rinses this color off without scrubbing or touching it.

Rey moves back and forth, putting dishes away and wiping down the table more thoroughly than necessity might demand. Ben lets the soap bubbles rise around his arms like leavened dough as he reaches through them, and they cling to his knuckles each time he pulls out another fork. The silence is busy and comfortable, but then he hears Rey speak.

“You look good, by the way.” She stands at the table, keeping the distance wide between them. “In case nobody’s told you yet.”

Ben pauses to scratch at a glob of dough burned onto the cooking pan. He can feel his ears flush red, as well as his throat. He holds the image of his own unkindly-lit reflection very steady in his mind.

“I wouldn’t go that far,” Ben says, turning over his shoulder towards her. “I’d say I look better than I did before. Most things probably would, in comparison.”

Rey takes a plastic broom and begins sweeping crumbs off the well-kept floor. Ben washes another mug.

“You didn’t look too bad, then. You just – okay, I guess you kind of did.” Rey’s spine straightens, and a hand claps over her mouth. Her eyes widen. “Wow, I’m sorry. That was incredibly rude.”

“No, it’s all right.” Ben feels the blush cool again. “It’s true.”

“I just meant – I’d get worried, before, you know? Obviously it wasn’t my business, but you always carried yourself around like you were full of new stitches.”

In demonstration, Rey gathers her shoulders up as though braced against a chilling draft and tightens the muscles of her stomach into a strained, painfully upright posture. Ben nods, lifts a plate out of the sink, and the decision he makes in this next brief pause is like releasing himself backwards into a free-fall.

“That’s not a bad way to describe it,” he tells her. “Methamphetamine doesn’t exactly do wonders for the constitution.”

Looking at Rey now might make her feel obligated to say something, and particularly to say something kind, so Ben turns away towards the sink again.

“Stupid fucking choice on my part, really. I figured I was already pissed off all the time anyway, so nobody would be able to tell the difference.” He sets the last scrubbed, steaming-hot plate aside to dry, watches water swirl clockwise down the drain. “I couldn’t tell the difference either, after a while.”

“How long have you been sober for?” Rey continues sweeping. “Or clean, I guess. How long have you been clean for?”

Ben rests his dripping hands on the counter. “Would we count this from the beginning of rehabilitation, or the end?”

“Beginning, I think. Right?” Rey stops, leans the broom against her fridge and comes to take cleaned dishes off the rack, but there is still the buffer zone of space around him which she does not enter. “I hear the beginning’s usually hardest.”

“Since last October, then.” There is a guttural heave as the sink finishes draining, and the steady-drumming sound of running water stops as Ben twists off its tap. “But you probably already had that figured out, didn’t you?”

“Something like that, yeah. What, um.” Rey pushes a cabinet closed, so slowly it does not make any noise, and at last allows herself to keep still. She pulls at the bracelets on her wrist but holds her eyes fixed on him. “What helped you stop? That’s important, too.”

Ben dries his hands on a towel. One of those blistered burns on his fingers is hurting again.

“Oh. It was stupid. I was out with Sn – him, and he makes some joke about the fact that I’m drenched in sweat, then puts a finger to my wrist and tells me he can’t find a pulse.” Ben looks down, breathes deep. It only shudders a bit when he exhales. “I could remember enough first-aid training to know what going into shock looked like, at least. He called an ambulance and set me down on a street curb before he left.”

Something armored-hard comes into Rey’s expression.

_(“You don’t mind, do you Ren? Of course you don’t. I know I don’t need to explain myself to you. It’s like that George Orwell quote, about minds being – hey, are you listening? Can you hear me?”_

Snoke had crouched down to grip him by the shoulders. Ren had observed, not for the first time, that the directions and angles of their scars were about the same, so that Snoke’s face was less like looking into a mirror and more like looking into the future.)

 “Your friend did that,” Rey says. “Snoke. He left you.”

“He’s not really a friend.” 

“No, I didn’t think so .” She leaves off fiddling with the bracelet. Ben cannot decide whether the severity of her expression makes her face seem older or younger. “What happened after that?”

 _(“Ren?”_ Snoke had repeated, more curious than concerned.

And Ren could hear him, naturally, although his blood pressure had been dropping like a plunge-line through water and his hands had been misty-damp and he’d been marveling at himself as though from behind a pane of two-way glass.

Too many different similes at once, Ren had thought. A catachrestic mess. 

But really, how odd. Three years of doing this, and yet after everything – everything, everything, everything – this moment should be the first time he worked up the determination to overdose. And Snoke was ruining it.

 _“I don’t want help,”_ Ren had slurred. _“Leave me alone.”_

 _“Damn, you’re a mess.”_ Snoke had said, letting his shoulders go. _“Suit yourself.”)_

Rey’s question may be difficult to answer now, because there are blanks that Ben knows cannot be filled in, like viewing a photograph with holes scorched through it.

But what he does remember goes as follows:

 “Well, the ambulance pulled up half a block away, first, because Snoke had given them a different address, and the next thing I know someone’s sticking another needle through my arm – which I wasn’t exactly keen on letting them do.” Ben closes his hands, watches the tensile veins stand out in his arms, and then relaxes them again. “They put me into four-point restraints before some poor paramedic could even try getting the IV in properly. Another one asked me what my name was.”

Ben forces himself to look up at Rey, standing there in her yellow sundress.

Yet if there are blanks, there are also particular things he can recall with excruciating clarity – the white lights overhead, the buckled straps chafing his wrists, the sibilant oxygen mask they’d kept attempting to bridle him with and above it all that loud, repeating question.

_(“What’s your name, sir? Can you give us a name?”)_

“I would’ve thought that was a fairly asinine thing for them to be worrying about,” Ben says, “except I couldn’t come up with an answer right then because I honestly couldn’t remember it.”

Rey’s left hand has lifted itself, very slowly, and is now pressed against her heart. She frowns, a thin line between her straight, dark eyebrows.  And here, Ben must acknowledge, free of resentment, is the definitive end to any possibility that she would have ever found him anything more – or less, perhaps – than physically repulsive.

Ben has no right to blame her. There were months when he closed his eyes while he showered, so that he would not erringly look down at himself and see the skin stretched taut over his bones like a bat’s wing.

Thank God he hadn’t put on the stupid green shirt.

(Then all the noises of the ambulance had faded around him, at once, as though he’d been folded up inside a large cloak, and instead Ren had heard something else.

 “ _– But you have to let me help you first, kid. You’re my son, and I love you, but you can be a real stubborn jackass sometimes. No need to ask who you get that from – so first I need you to meet me halfway there, got it? I need you to ask me for help. Ask once, that’s all I need to hear. You ask me that, and I’ll do anything you need me to. I swear on my life – Ben, at least look at me for a second. Ben? – ”_

Or Ren had imagined he’d heard this, anyway, since of course he knew his father was dead.

And no transmutative high could ever take him out of his own mind for far enough or long enough to forget this, any more than it allowed him to forget the scar on his face or the stamped notice on all his college transcripts or the fact that he was always, always still himself once he sunk back down again.

Yet suddenly, inconveniently, it had occurred to him that he did not want to die.

 _“My name is Ben,”_ he had informed the paramedic. _“Ben Solo.”)_

And this is not even the worst thing about him, either. That is not even the deepest-sunken thing that Ben could dredge up to his surface and show her.

“So the next day I asked to have my mail held, handed myself over to those philanthropic folks at Alderaan, and after twelve weeks of dreaming about stuff that would make Salvador Dali green with envy they decided I could become a participating member of society again.” Ben runs a hand through his hair, wondering what he should say next. Nothing, most likely. He has said more than enough already. “You know the rest.”

“I do.”

Ben moves away from the counter.

He lifts the last slice of coffee cake, which Rey has wrapped into a napkin for him to take, and feels his ears beginning to flush again with shame as he steers himself towards the door. Rey has offered him her food and the laughing company of her friend and another piece from that past life she has hammered together with her new one, and in exchange Ben has given her this dreary emotional bullshit. It does not strike him as an equivalent exchange.

And now she is silent.

“I’m sorry,” Ben tells her. He grips the doorknob hard as he turns it. “You didn’t need to hear all that.”

“Why are you apologizing?” She does not move to follow after him. “I was the one who asked.”

“Yes. But still.”

“No, really. Thank –” Rey purses her lips, the line between her brows deepening, and she curls that hand held over her heart until it makes a fist. Her feet take one jerking step forward before she stops herself. “Thank you for telling me. I mean that. Honesty is really hard – you can trust me on that one.”

Ben stays framed in the doorway while he looks back at her.

He remembers what Finn has said, has told him in place of a lie: the hot-wired truck, the high-grown field, the astral kick from a sprained foot, the purity of desperation that had led her to believe such things were necessary. 

Rey is telling the truth, he realizes.

“Thank you for listening, then,” Ben says, cautiously, and from somewhere he draws out a smile. “And thank you for inviting me. You have a very good friend.”

“I know.”

Then Ben shuts the door, taking care not to slam it or let it jar on its hinges, and carries his heavy-weighted heart the few steps over to his apartment. He almost trips over his dropped bag but does not. He sifts through the orderly pile of his mother’s envelopes until he finds one that has been laid aside, creased where he has folded it.

Ben holds his breath and tears it open along the top.

It contains an old Polaroid photograph, the back marked with scrawling penmanship: _09/10/1996._ _Kessel Run Day, NW Territories – 12 hrs, 5 mns! (I told him to smile!!)_

The picture captures a tall man with hair that has just begun turning silver, standing in the cold sunlight of an early autumn day. A windswept airfield is visible behind him. He wears a dark leather jacket, aviator glasses tipped back onto his forehead, and has posed himself – has been caught, actually, because Ben had taken this without permission, but his subject had managed to strike some swaggering figure at the last second anyhow – in front of an aluminum-bodied bush plane. It has a steerable tailwheel and a destructively powerful engine.

“Hey, old man,” Ben says. “I guess I should apologize to you, too. Not that you haven’t heard it already.”

He wanders in several directions, bumping about like a dazed fly, and finally slides the photograph’s bottom corner between his phone and the wall. He does not have a frame to put it in, and even if he did he would not know where to hang it.

Although maybe he wouldn’t have a right to do that, either.

Then Ben showers with his face turned towards the warm water, satisfied if nothing else by the ropey muscles that stretch and contract whichever way he bids them, and he lies down with wet hair to fall uneasily but eventually asleep. At work he provides Phasma with the word to fill in her crossword puzzle, C-Y-A-N-I-D-E.

And a week later, around 7:30 PM, there is a smiting knock on the door.

“Hey,” Rey says, when he opens it. “Are you lactose intolerant?”

“No,” Ben tells her. “Thus another of your fiendish little plots to assassinate me is foiled.”

“I cooked too much fettucine alfredo,” she drives onward. “I’m terrible about estimating pasta servings, I always end up boiling the whole box. It’s mixed with chicken and broccoli – would you like to help me finish it? We can celebrate.”

“Why? What’s the occasion?”

“Today. I don’t know. It’s whatever you want it to be,” Rey cocks her head. “Think of something.”

He wavers, searching her face to discover that nothing in its expression has changed.

And Ben knows this is likely attributable to her goodness, to her brightness, to the general hardihood of her philosophy, one seemingly devoid of any useless pity for either others or herself. It makes him imagine her mind as a crystalline prism, scattering light into its separate colors – although her heart, Ben guesses, is not nearly so hard.

“I might as well,” Ben says, and then steps forward. He shuts the door behind him. “Since we’re both here anyway.”

“That’s the spirit.”

…

In September, it rains for three days straight without stopping. Fallen leaves stick to shoes and windows and clog up the gutters as they rot.  Storefront awnings stream like cascades. Roadside ditches and rivers spill their banks like overflowing cups. The plaster on Ben’s walls bubbles up in places and can be peeled away with two fingers.

On the third day, Rey engages in a frantic early-morning effort to bring her chrysanthemums and asters – growing in old teakettles and metal colanders – from off the balcony before they drown. Ben offers to help when he hears her banging things around.

 In the midst of their hurry, however, Rey’s spaceship bird feeder gets yanked from its wire by a resounding slap of wind and smashes itself apart seven stories down on the parking lot’s asphalt. Ben lunges against the rusted railing in an effort to catch it, and Rey in turn snags Ben by the belt to keep him from hurtling after it. She lets him go almost instantly, sets aside an onion that she’s housed inside a rubber boot, and shrugs her way into a huge fisherman’s slicker hanging on the coatrack.

“I should go get that. Otherwise somebody’s likely to pop their tire.” She zips up the coat. “And we don’t want those Area 51 people to come snooping around.”

“I wouldn’t advise seeking out life on other planets, personally,” Ben opines, as he follows her down the stairs. “We can barely manage it on this one.”

They dash around the parking lot for fifteen minutes, collecting three handfuls of scrap metal and flat-head screws in total – Ben’s hands are used as the measuring standard for this, since his are larger – before they admit defeat. They are also, by this time, both thoroughly soaked, dripping water off their shoulders and their backs and their hair. Puddles collect on every stairwell landing as they climb back up again, and a larger puddle forms across Rey’s floor once they’ve spread the salvaged pieces across her kitchen table.

“Shit-biscuits,” she says. “I don’t think this is worth the trouble of putting back together. My clientele is going to be quite put-out.”

“The metal should be reusable.” Ben picks up a piece of aluminum siding, flips it over, studying the rough-hewn edge. “I can try, if you’d like. My predecessor at work left behind a soldering iron and a chop saw that might be useful. I’ll make an effort not to cut my hand off.”

“Oh! That’d be really nice.” Rey smiles at him, but there are drops of rain clinging to her eyelashes and so Ben glances away fast. “Not the part about cutting your hand off, though. Don’t do that. But the bird feeder would be great. You’re welcome to give it a go, if it’s not too much trouble.”

He gathers the pieces up with an old towel and carries them into his apartment. In the meanwhile, Rey sets out several dishes – no, he discovers, they’re sealed hubcaps – and scatters seed into one for the birds to eat. The other is meant to collect rainwater for a birdbath. The sparrows chatter and gossip as they wash themselves off.

Rey also contracts a bludgeoning head cold which leaves her honking like a goose by the next morning, half-comatose by the morning after that, although Ben brings his ear up close against the wall in time to hear her tapping out a request for canned chicken noodle soup and antihistamine pills. He passes these to her through a door she refuses to open any further than a crack, with the defense that she looks like a Gorgon and the sight would turn him to stone. This is the first time he can recall her ever missing work.

Which is why, late on a sunny Saturday morning, Ben overhears her.

He is bending fragments of scrap metal flat with pliers, accounting for how much material he might have to work with. A CD player he’s purchased rests on the table, a pair of headphones over his ears while an audiobook plays. He’s borrowed it from the library while doing other research. It is a dramatic reading of Sophocles’ Greek tragedy _Ajax_ , about the aftermath of the Trojan War, which Ben had found as a paperback in the Alderaan Rehabilitation Center’s book collection but had been unable to focus on for long enough to finish.

He’s reached an early scene where Tecmessa is speaking. Ajax, in a fit of blind madness and rage, has slaughtered a herd of cattle in the belief that they were his fellow soldiers.

 _“…But now, grown sane, new misery is his,”_ the actress reads, _“for on woes self-wrought he gazes aghast, wherein no hand but his own had share, and with anguish is his soul afflicted….”_

It’s a good play.

Except hair keeps falling in his face – he went for a run and showered several hours ago, it’s still slightly damp, he should get it trimmed – so Ben takes off the headphones to swipe it back for the twentieth time.

And then Rey’s voice raises enough to come through the thin wall.

“Yes, hello? Is this Bespin System customer service? Hi! My name is Rey Kenobi. I’m calling to ask about why my cell phone service has been shut off? This is the only number it’s letting me dial….No, I just have your basic plan. Domestic calls only, with whatever the smallest data package is. Do you need my account number? It’s, uh, 20626, followed by five zeroes….What? Wait, stop, no. That can’t be right. I paid my last bill on August 15th, like usual. This month’s isn’t….The 1st of the month? Since when?....No, I was never notified! Well, how soon can you have it….Twenty-four hours? Why? Do you launch somebody into outer space and have them manually adjust the satellite?”

Ben almost laughs, except something in Rey’s voice reminds him of the sound a water glass rim makes when one finger is run quickly around it: translucent, brittle, lifting up towards a splintering crescendo. 

He sets the headphones aside and half-rises from his chair. He’s never heard her speak like that, either.

“…I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know you’re just the messenger. I just really wanted to….Okay then. I’ll consider the extended plan…. Yes. Thank you. I’m sorry again. Twenty-four hours, you said?....Right, yes. Thank you. You have a nice day.”

There is a pause, as she either hangs up or puts down the phone. Ben moves to sit again, affirming that she has a right to whatever privacy these walls will allow her and that eavesdropping is exceedingly creepy behavior. No doubt she’ll go back to resting. Or –

“Dammit,” Rey says. 

And Ben hears a single tired, sniffling, lonely sound coming from Rey’s apartment into his, and he is enough of an expert in such noises – from listening to himself, obviously – to know that it is not sinus-related.

Ben gets up and walks balanced on the balls of his feet, to make as little sound as possible, though he must ask his hand thrice before it actually lifts to knock on her door. He speaks with his mouth about an inch away from the wood so that he does not have to shout.

“Rey.”

“Uh. Yeah.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yeah. Don’t worry. Just navigating the good old fuckery-duckery of bureaucracy, you know? Sorry.” She seems to shuffle across the floor. “I can’t hear myself through this cold, so I have to talk really loud. I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“That’s understandable.” Ben must press his forehead against the door to collect enough energy for this next question. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Uh.”

She shuffles to the door. Ben springs back in time for her to open it.

Her eyes are watery, her nose red-raw from incessant contact with the scratchy tissues, her skin pale and perspiring in a way that makes him think of damp wool. The sweatshirt and leggings she wears are dark purple and pink polka-dotted, respectively, in contrast with the fluffy black socks, but she’s diligently worked her hair into those same three buns as usual. Her textbooks and school notes are spread out on the old writing desk they’d hauled up here back in June.

“Can I use your phone?” she asks, blearily, brandishing her own cell phone as she talks. “It’s really not that important. This is when I have my morning break, at work, so I always call my grandfather – I keep nagging him to get a landline. But he doesn’t want telemarketers badgering him, so every week he drives into Tatooine first thing Saturday morning and waits for me to call him on a phone at their diner. It’s kind of a standing appointment.”

She sniffles, draws tissues from her sleeve like a magician, and blows her nose. Ben glances past her to those photographs hanging on the wall. A man whose name he happens to share stands looking out from within one frame, although he suspects that names are where their similarities begin and end.

“I don’t own a cell phone,” Ben admits, “but I have a cordless one I can bring over. Wait here.”

Rey is sitting at her refinished desk when Ben returns, her knees folded up close to her chest, and she takes the phone over her shoulder. He makes as if to leave once she begins dialing, but Rey’s glance and casual wave detains him.

The phone rings twice.

“Chalmun’s Diner,” Ben hears a muffled, barking voice say. “What do you need?”

“Hi, Lars.” Rey puts her free hand up against her ear. “It’s Rey. Is my grandfather there yet?”

“What, that crusty old son-of-a-bitch? He was waiting outside when I opened the doors this morning.” There is a clinking of cutlery and glasses, the periodic ding of a bell. The owner’s voice lifts as though he is bellowing down along the counter. “Hey! Ben! I got some nice young lady here that wants to talk to you. God knows why.”

There is a pause, a bump when the phone changes hands, and a different person speaks.

“Ah-ha,” Ben Kenobi says. “There she is.”

Rey laughs, coughs, sneezes so explosively that Ben is amazed it doesn’t snap her neck. He carries a tissue box over to place it on the desk while she begins a chattering conversation, then waits with both hands behind his back to examine her resuscitated asters and chrysanthemums.

He wrote an essay on _Hamlet_ when he was in high school, which involved researching the symbolism behind Ophelia’s maidenly weeds, and his mother has always had an artistic sense for which flowers to wear in her corsage at state dinners. She’d once used a festive arrangement of snapdragons and oleanders to let the governor know he was a perfidious liar whose death she may or may not have been plotting.

But he can’t recall what meanings these flowers are supposed to have, if they have any at all. The chrysanthemums are red and white, while the asters are pink.

Occasionally he turns a casual ear towards what Rey is saying.

“So what happened with those two agents who came to ask about the property?...No. You didn’t!....Of course you did….And then I’m sure you said, _‘Oh, aren’t these what you’re looking for?’_....Well, that’s that, then. Now there’s some official report in the state records about getting chased off your land by a herd of musk hogs…Wait, wait, hold on. Ben! Ben, come over here.”

Rey pushes a button that puts the phone into speaker mode, beckoning Ben to come stand beside the desk.

“Grandad Ben,” she says, “this is Neighbor Ben. Neighbor Ben, this is Grandad Ben. Say hello to each other.”

 Ben stares at the phone she’s holding towards his mouth, although her arms are not long enough to reach all the way. He bows his head slightly to speak.

“Hello, Mister Kenobi.”

“Hello there!” The voice is accented, like Rey’s, though it is both rougher and more austere. “And that’s Sir Major-Commodore Obi-Wan to you, my boy.”

This is the phonetic pronunciation, at least, as Ben hears it, so it takes a moment for him to properly translate: OB-1 is an elite bomber squadron code in the Royal Air Force.

Then Ben’s memory flashes to a captioned photograph, in one of those innumerable military and aviation history books he’d kept stacked by his bed and on his shelves and on his floor, and it suddenly occurs to him who he is speaking with – one of the top retired ace pilots in British history, recipient of both a knighthood and a Distinguished Service Cross for valor in action against the enemy, Sir Major-Commodore Benjamin Kenobi.

Oh.

“Yes, Sir,” Ben amends.

“Rey tells me you’re a former military man yourself, is that correct? 77th Special Forces Group? _‘Pro Utilitate Hominum,’_ I believe the motto goes. I’ll wager you boys saw some lively action overseas in Tuanul.”

“We did, Sir.”

“But tell me something, Ben,” Sir Kenobi goes on, “between the two of us, do you suppose our girl works too hard? I know she’s strong-headed as anything, she takes New Years’ resolutions like holy oaths, but on occasion I worry that she keeps herself a bit too tightly-wound.”

Ben glances down at the homework Rey has spread across her desk. There is a filled-in chart – and several additional blank photocopies, for practice – of various pressure points on the human body, a stack of about two hundred hand-made flash cards, and lined paper filled with notes in color-coded pen. The textbook has yellow tags stuck to its pages for reference.

“She’s a very dedicated student, Sir.”

It may be the fever, or the irritated sinuses, or the sunlit window she is sitting in front of, but Rey seems to blush.

 “Yes, yes, I know. Capable young woman, isn’t she? She should attend to that cold, though….What’s that? No, I’m almost finished.” There’s a thump, as though Sir Kenobi has placed the phone against his chest to speak, then he conveys the mouthpiece closer again. “Has Rey wandered off while I was babbling? These people don’t seem accustomed to hearing civilized conversation.”

“I’m right here, Grandad.”

“Hmmm.” His voice lowers. “Rey, I believe you specifically assured me that the man I spoke to just now was _olde_ –”

Rey stabs the button to switch him off of speaker.

“Did you ever get that scrapped dirt bike running again?” she asks, loudly. “I’d like to ride it out to the ravine, next time I’m home.”

They converse for several minutes more –  the dirt bike is running, there are fresh eggs in the fridge, he has not tried to re-shingle the roof again, he keeps picking up some dim-witted wanker on the CB radio who calls himself J.A.R Binks –  before the diner’s owner starts to pester him about long-distance charges per minute.

Rey holds the phone in both hands when she says goodbye, cradling her shoulder around it. Her feet are hooked over the edge of the seat she has scrunched herself into.

“Don’t go anywhere, okay?” she says. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Rey,” he responds. “You know where to find me.”

“Of course.”

Rey listens to the dial tone for ten full seconds, inclining her head towards its monotonous sound, and then she hangs up as well. Strands of her mussed hair float up into the sunlight. She sniffles again, but the tissue box is empty.

“He seems like a character,” Ben begins.

“No kidding.” She wobbles to her feet and throws away the box. “He’s completely barmy. He was trying to dig up an old septic tank, this one time, out behind one of our sheds, except the ground was too hard for us to break up with shovels – so he got some gunpowder, rolled it up into cigarette papers, and we tied them off with lengths of cannon fuse. I think they saw the mushroom cloud thirty miles away in Flagstaff.”

“He must live somewhere in northern Verde Valley, then.” Ben tries to picture the state map, its spine of mountains running down like a seam alongside the Painted Desert.  “Or are you up on the rim?”

Rey takes an aerosol can of disinfectant from her tiny broom closet, shakes it, and blasts his phone with a cloud of what the label claims to be Dreamy Ocean Breeze.  It smells like the last circle of hell.

“No, our house is in the valley. There was this huge day-blooming bindweed Grandad let grow all over the our walls – he never cut it down because I used it for climbing onto the roof. The whole first month I lived with him, I’d wake up every morning and sit there to watch the sunrise hit Maroon Mountain.” She waves away the noxious spray. “I wanted to be sure it was still there.”

“That you were still there,” Ben adds, unthinking.

“That too.”

Ben has never driven along the winding state roads, there, but he has seen this mountain from the copilot’s seat of his father’s airplane. Its summit soars six thousand feet out of the surrounding evergreen forests, its atavistic bands of red and white sandstone flaming red-gold where they catch the sun.

He considers Rey, tucked down amongst the valley’s blue shadows, waiting alongside all those closed-up white flowers for the daylight to reach her.

 “How did – ” he nods his head towards the other picture, of Rey sitting on the stone steps beside her pugnacious nun. “How did they find him?”

“You know, it’s really weird. I mean, like, really, supernatural, fate-type of weird.” Rey tears off a section of paper towel. She twists it around itself like a finger puzzle when she’s finished using it. “Maz had been visiting England, right around the time Grandad had his flying accident – the Sisters of Kanata operate a charitable hospital outside Westminster, so she was there changing sheets and giving communion and whatnot when she went to the wing where he was recovering. Grandad’s a lapsed Anglican, so they got into this big argument about transubstantiation. The nurses told Maz it was the first conversation he’d had in six weeks. ”

Ben smiles. The paper towel coils up as tightly as it will go, so Rey releases it again.

“And then when Maz sees me, you know, almost fifty years later, sulking there in the county courthouse with some clothes they’ve lent me and this big taser-burn hickey on my side, the very first thing she asks is, _‘Have we met before, child?’_ Like I said, it was weird.”

Rey laughs to herself, a weak and slumping sound. Ben, uncertain what else to do, pulls out one of the kitchen chairs and turns it pointedly towards her. She sits. 

“Did she know where your grandfather was living?”

“No, it took her a while to track him down. About a year? Grandad didn’t really want to be found, at that point. But the day – the day he drove up to get me, I was sitting in our dormitory’s little tearoom where they brought guests, and in walks this old man with a layer of dust on his coat and hair.” Rey makes a gesture over her head, to indicate what she means. “I was so nervous I thought I was going to hurl. I kept telling myself, oh, what if there’s been a big mistake, and he’ll realize I don’t belong to him after all? But then Grandad looks right at me, and puts his hands on his hips, and just goes _, ‘Ah-ha! There she is!’_ ”

Rey begins blinking very rapidly, her eyes turned towards the ceiling, and a painful-balanced concentration comes into her face and voice at once. She breathes deeply through her nose – as deeply as she can, given how congested she is – and lets it go on the count of five.

Ben knows this because he is holding his breath as well.

“Ugh. Sorry. I haven’t been sleeping too well. I’ve always had a tough time sleeping anyway, but this head cold has been a pain in the arse.” Rey looks at him and grins, her eyes glistening. “I’d just waited a really long time to hear that, is all.”

Autumn sunlight the color of sawdust seems to almost pass through her, slanting in from the eastward-facing window to catch at Rey’s curls of hair and her hard-set shoulders. Her sentence hangs oddly like a cautious invitation, so Ben takes it.

“Why?” he asks.

“Ah.” Rey picks at her flaking nail polish. “It’s not that dramatic. When, uh, when I was little, it was just my mom and me. She didn’t keep in contact with Grandad after she left home. She never spoke about him, either. We were living in Coruscant – do you know where that is? It’s an old steel company town in Ohio, there wasn’t a whole lot to do. She rented a single-person room in this big boarding house and worked two different jobs so we’d have enough for rent and the car.”

“Who took care of you when she wasn’t there?”

“I was all right on my own. We had a little two-burner gas stove where I cooked macaroni and cheese for dinner. I mean, seriously, I ate that every night. It’s a good thing _I’m_ not lactose intolerant.” Rey doesn’t have the energy to laugh at this, and maybe she can’t. “But one morning she called in late for work so she could do my hair – we were having picture day, at school, and I’d wanted to pick a galaxy-themed backdrop to pose with. I asked if she could make me look like a space princess.”

And here, with one lifted hand, Rey points to those three oddly-styled buns that he has never seen her without.

Ben has always thought it looked like a series of knots in a rope, or the separated petals on an exotic orchid, but studying it now he must agree that it does, indeed, have something a bit supernal to its design.

Rey’s hand slips back down.

“She was gone when I got home that afternoon. She’d left me a hand-written note and fifteen dollars to buy pizza.” Rey purses her lips. “I could’ve just waited for her to come back, except we wouldn’t start learning cursive until second grade and I wanted to know what the note said. I showed it to one of our other tenants, then he called the police and they called DCF.”

Ben has his arms crossed, over his chest, but now he puts them down at his sides.

“You never saw her again,” he finishes.

“No.”

Rey tries to take another breath. It sticks in her throat, sticks when she tries again, as though her lungs refuse to open all the way – as though she is being suffocated by the force of her own rigid self-containment.

“And a lot of times I could tell myself, yeah, but that’s okay. If she really knew she couldn’t take care of me anymore, then she must’ve thought she was doing the best thing for both of us by leaving.”

“Yes,” Ben says. “She may have told herself that.”

“But other times – other times I’d be sleeping on Plutt’s back stoop, or rooting around in some supermarket dumpster because I hadn’t eaten in three days, and I’d start to wonder if she ever – got married, or something.” Rey begins talking faster, beads spilling off a cut string. “I’d think, wow, maybe she’s a completely different person now. Maybe she’s with somebody who’ll stay and take care of her the way my dad couldn’t, whoever he was. Maybe we wouldn’t even recognize each other if we met, and that’s why she never wanted to come find me. And – ”

Rey fights for one last, steadying breath. It is a fight she happens to lose.

“—Sometimes I still think about it, and every time I do I just get so fucking angry that I find myself hoping she’s dead.”

It happens all at once, an involuntary and violent surrender, like the breaking of a bone or the shattering of glass or the act of throwing down a sword and shield together. A sound surges up through her throat, her eyes well over, her face goes red.

And then Rey starts to cry.

“That’s a horrible thing to say.” She attempts to wipe at her cheeks fast enough so the tears won’t slip down, attempts to stop her nose from running. She cannot do both at the same time. “It’s absolutely horrible. I don’t mean it, I really, really don’t. I still miss her so much. I know how happy I’d be if she actually came back again, but I know that’s never –”

Her words break off, or break down. She’s still struggling for composure, in starts and gasps, the fight of a person long-accustomed to crying by themselves.

For a moment Ben feels himself transfixed, as though his chest has been run through with a cross-guarded sword. To move forward here would be impossible, because there is nothing he can offer her – this girl who has made herself good and bright and strong so that she might carry such raging grief, and not be carried by it instead, this girl who is stronger than even she herself knows – but he cannot move away, either, at least not yet, because her tissues are gone and she is wiping her face on a ragged sweatshirt sleeve.

So, silently, Ben follows the short hallway to her bathroom.

Its walls are covered in green paisley wallpaper. The tidy, well-lit space makes him feel gigantic and clumsy when his elbow knocks over several bottles of lotion, when her toothbrush goes clattering into the sink, but in less than a minute he has come back clutching a packet of facial tissues and a fresh roll of two-ply toilet paper.

 He stands for a second before the chair that Rey is sitting in, and then sinks to one knee and holds out his offerings in either hand. Passing them across the table would seem rude. This bow brings them to about eye level with one another, while the tributary gesture serves as an appropriate marker of partitioning distance.

“Here,” he says. “You don’t need to do that.”

“Thank you.”

Rey reaches half-blindly for the toilet paper and winds a long section around her hand. She’s taken practiced control of her breathing again.

 “I hate being angry like this, you know that? I hate it.” She presses the tissue to her face for several beats, stares into it as she draws it away, folds it into smaller quarters. “Grandad used to lend me one of his old service revolvers, after we’d talked about it. He’d let me go out behind the house with a pocketful of bullets and a big bag of recycled soda cans, then I’d stand there and shoot them apart into scrap metal one after the other. And it’d be better, for a while, but it always came back. It makes me feel so –”

“Helpless,” Ben says. 

It is as easy as rounding off a memorized line of poetry. It carries the sound of everything Ben has ever smashed or cracked or broken – walls and chairs and cups, but usually parts of himself.

 “Yes.” Rey nods. “I mean, why should I still be angry? I’m not a child anymore. I know she didn’t mean for everything to happen like it did. She couldn’t have known.”

“But it hurt you.” This, too, comes with a benedictive ease, although now Ben is speaking from a different side of things. “A person can do that even if they have good intentions.”

“Ugh. Maybe. I just wish I could – ” Rey sighs. “I wish I could make it go away. I hate letting things control me.”

“But you don’t let it control you.” Ben curls one hand, lightly, and taps his fingertips against his other palm, as though he’s placed a small, round stone there. “You never put your anger first, anyway.”

Rey starts to nod, but it changes to a slow shake of her head.

“I don’t know what that means.”

His gaze travels past her. Behind her is the desk, and the window, through which he can see the city skyline and a thin piece of the bay. He should probably stand up, because the floor is hard and cold, but his thoughts are so precarious that any sudden movement might turn their course aside or make him lose his nerve altogether.

“Why did you move here?” he asks.

Rey wads up the used tissue to begin shredding in pieces on her lap. She does it methodically, moving in from the edges, twisting off corners between her green-polished fingers.

“I already told you, this place was the only thing I had money for.”

“No, here. To Takodana Bay. You could’ve studied somewhere closer to home. Why come all the way out to the northeast?”

Several scraps of white tissue drift from her lap to the floor, like large, damp snowflakes. Neither of them notices.

“I thought it’d be nice to be near Finn. He didn’t have anybody for a long time, either. And I wanted a chance to move some place new just because I’d chosen it, instead of having someone bring me there or because I couldn’t go anywhere else.” Rey turns her head away, towards those chrysanthemums they’ve brought in from the rain. She swallows. “Grandad took me to San Francisco, once, so I’d seen the ocean, but never from this side. I always wondered what it’d look like in the sunrise.”

Ben stares at the wide-angled line of Rey’s jaw.

 She is still crying, though quietly, but holds her head at the proud and ascendant angle of a dignitary or a queen – another inept metaphor, Ben reprimands himself, because what would that make him down here on his knees? A penitent. Or a beggar.

Honesty, she’s said. Honesty is hard, and healing is about how you untangle the knots, and now he knows these are lessons she has somehow allowed the years to teach her. Ben is fairly certain his own life has taught him very little, if only because he has not allowed it to.

But on this one particular matter, in which she has already outmatched him, he can at least tell her what he knows. Anger is, to speak frankly, his narrow field of expertise.

So.

“I moved out here because it was as far away as I could get from my parents without drowning myself in the Atlantic,” Ben tells her. “I told them I didn’t care if I ever saw either of them again. That contrast seems to speak for itself, doesn’t it?”

Her fingers stop their shredding movements. She turns her head back towards him and tips her chin down slightly to look him in the eyes. More false snow has drifted on her lap.

“Was that after you left the army?”

“I didn’t leave. It was an OTH discharge.”

“Does that mean – ?”

  _“‘Other than honorable.’_ ” He gets to his feet, steps away. “They had every right to call it that, I suppose.”

Her breathing has leveled out, and her posture has changed to one of cautious attention. Her face remains flushed, though, and her nose continues its imperturbable dribble. She waits for him to continue.

“We were dropped down into a valley in eastern Tuanul, one night. We had orders to capture this insurgent leader named Lor San Tekka. Our directives stated he needed to be taken alive – he’d gotten possession of an encrypted digital map marking the location of every militant hide-out and weapons storehouse within a fifty mile radius.” He pauses. “That struck me as more efficient than just bombing all the villages, which we’d been informed was the alternative solution.”

Ben puts his hands into his pockets, studies the floor between his feet.

“I jammed their radar signals before we moved in on the base, so they couldn’t radio for aid. After we’d captured him I tried putting the data card into a reader and extracting the information. But San Tekka had, ah.” He bites his lower lip, considering how these words should fit together. “He’d corrupted the file. There was a huge piece missing, right out of the middle, so I realized the whole map was worthless. I lost my temper.”

 _(“You son of a bitch!”_ Ben had torn off his helmet to roar this, a poorly-considered idea because it meant he could no longer disguise the fact that he was crying. _“You goddamn murdering son of a bitch! Do you have any fucking idea what you’ve done?”_

San Tekka had not blinked, had not flinched, had regarded Ben with that same defiant, steel-eyed impassivity he wore in all his photographs. He had said something, quietly and not unkindly, within which Ben could only translate the words for _‘guilt’_ and _‘God.’_

He had felt his feet start to move.

Their weapons sergeant had grabbed at him, their medic following suit. But Ben had been both the tallest and the strongest man in his detachment, and with rage like that humming through his bones he’d been able to fling them both into the dust without visible effort. 

 _“Sergeant Solo!”_ his commander had been shouting. _“Sergeant Solo, stop! Stop! That is an order!”)_

Rey tries to cover up a cough, stifling it against her sleeve. She nods.

“They were holding him by the arms, even though he hadn’t tried to run. His men hadn’t done anything either – I walked over and yanked him off his feet.” Ben grabs two fistfuls of the air in illustration, recalling the smells of smoke and sweat and gunpowder as he’d hauled the old man close and shaken him. San Tekka still hadn’t blinked, still hadn’t flinched. “We’d already searched him for weapons, but I guess they’d somehow missed the M-26 grenade he’d been keeping in his coat.”

And here Ben lifts a hand to tap that long, gouging scar on his face, its texture more familiar than the skin that used to be there. Rey’s eyes widen.

“Obviously, it didn’t end up being the live capture we’d hoped for. None of our men were killed, but they all could’ve been if they’d reacted any slower.” Men with families, Ben thinks, men who carried rosary beads or talisman stones or women’s silk scarves or pictures of their children in their pockets, while Ben carried nothing because he had professed no belief in luck. “I got my discharge notice while I was still in the hospital.”

(He hadn’t felt it, at first, because the piece of shrapnel had been so shrieking-hot and surgically sharp that it seemed to cauterize the wound’s edges.  Then Ben had seen himself in the cracked eye-shield of his helmet and thought, it looks just like a torn seam, a torn seam in cloth, except those are nerves and muscles and capillaries instead of threads.

His ears had been ringing. The black scarf around his neck, meant for keeping dust out of his mouth, had been smoldering. He’d stayed on his feet through the whole firefight that followed and had not been able to tell afterwards whose blood was spilled down his flak jacket.)

“Back home wasn’t any better, of course. I couldn’t hold a job because I’d never finished college and got into fights with anybody who tried giving me what I thought sounded like an order. My mother must’ve – I convinced myself she was thinking, if only I’d been – paralyzed, maybe, or blinded, then the press wouldn’t have been so willing to rake her across the coals about raising such an ethically irresponsible child. Or at least they might’ve waited a little longer.”

“Why was it any of their business?”

“My mother is Senator Leia Solo. You might’ve seen her picture somewhere, while you were in California – I used to think my being in the army would help her, on the PR side of things. Upholding my grandfather’s legacy and all.” Ben performs a mocking salute. “My father always did say I tended to let things blow up in my face, and there was his proof every single time he saw me.”

Ben doesn’t want to talk anymore, he feels emptied and tired, but he carries on anyway.

 “And I hated them for it. I hated myself, really, that’s who I was angry with, but that kind of thing tends to bleed through into everything else. So I moved out here, instead. I figured I’d be doing them a favor.”

“So that’s when you started –um, that’s when you met – ”

“Yes,” Ben says. “And that’s what I mean by putting your anger first.”

“Ben. You can’t blame – ”

“But you,” Ben says, before Rey can finish, because this is not-not-not about him, “you don’t do that. Not from what I’ve seen. I mean, for fuck’s sake, look around you. Look at all this. Your anger didn’t have anything to do with it. And whether your mom predicted it or not, this is where you’ve brought yourself.”

He spreads his arms, briefly. His gesture may be aimed at the blossoming flowers, or the city beyond her window with its view of the eastward-facing ocean. It’s probably all of them at once.

Whatever he means to indicate, though, Rey’s eyes do not follow the gesture.

“The anger might never go away like you want it to. Or maybe it will. I hope it does, but I haven’t gotten that far myself yet so I can’t tell you honestly.” He lets his arms drop, crosses them over his chest once more. “And sometimes you might feel helpless, but you won’t be. You’ve figured out ways to – not to control it, that’s not really what I wanted to say before. You’re allowed to feel it when you need to. What I meant is that you’ve learned how to grow around it.”

This last note is a stupid and unhelpful thing to say, and it doesn’t sound at all the way that he’d wanted it to. Really, it sounds trite. But if he were better at translating this sort of thing into words, Ben understands, he would most likely not have those patched-over holes in his apartment walls. He wouldn’t be the patched-over person that he is, either.

Because perhaps what Ben hated his parents for, really, was the fact that he hadn’t been born somebody else.

 And they had followed his request to give him space, to never visit – with one singular, notable, irrevocable exception.

_(“Ben, could you just – All right, all right, fine. You don’t have to look at me, either. That’s all I wanted to tell you, anyway. We love you, we miss you, and we want you to come home if you’re ready. I came all the way here to say that.”)_

Ben sighs.

“Now,” he tells Rey, pointing at her pile of books, “I’m going to shut up, and you’re going to put that work away and get some rest like a semi-normal human being. I’ll run down the street to buy you a box of real tissues so you don’t rub your nose off.”

She starts in surprise.

“I’m fine. You don’t need to do that.”

“No, but I’d like to.” Ben grabs the aerosol-doused phone and sticks it into a back jean pocket as he walks out. “I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

It takes him twenty-five, because there is a long line and somebody has decided to buy fifty dollars’ worth of lottery tickets before tonight’s drawing. Ben walks up and down the wire shelves three times, feeling oddly detached from his body – as though his mind and heart are drifting out behind him, dazedly, like a balloon tied to a string – while he gathers tissues and sports drinks and cough drops. A plastic bucket of fresh-cut gerbera daisies rests beside the front counter, in front of the mints and candy bars. Ben stares at these but ultimately does not pick one up. 

Rey has left her door propped open. She is standing there and waiting for him when he ducks through it.

“That took longer than I thought.” Ben indicates the plastic bags he holds in either hand. “I didn’t know which kind of tissues you wanted, so I just purchased the least offensively-colored boxes. If you need me to, I can – ”

He never finishes this thought. Rey puffs herself up, her back straightened like a diver on the high board, and then she steps forward and slides her arms around his chest and hugs him. Ben feels his body lock up, and he stares down at the top of her head where it is tucked beneath his chin.

She rests an ear against him so that her voice will not be muffled by his coat. No doubt she can hear Ben’s heart, this way, because it’s beating hard enough to crack his sternum, but she doesn’t let go.

“Sorry I called you an asshole,” Rey says, in a muddied voice. “You know, that one time.”

“Like I said, you weren’t wrong.” Ben pauses, but finally eases one of the bags down as quietly as he can and wraps his right arm around behind her shoulders. He doesn’t know where to put his left one, though, so it stays where it is. “Besides, we established that I’m only a partial asshole.”

Rey is pressed so close against him that when she laughs he can feel its reverberations through his own chest. She gives one last squeeze before letting go.

“Thanks for this,” she says, picking up the bags. “How much do I owe you?”

“Nothing,” Ben tells her. “You don’t owe me anything.”

…

Around the middle of October, Ben purchases the cheapest digital camera he can find and spends an evening fiddling with its various buttons. This means shooting a collection of banal – or perhaps bold and avant-garde, amongst certain artistic circles – pictures featuring his kitchen table, his cabinets covered in old memos, his puddle-dampened running shoes stuffed with newspaper to dry, and his blank, staring walls.

He deletes these and opens another letter from Leia.

And on a clear blue Sunday morning, Ben talks himself into driving out beyond the city. He follows highways, and then the more well-traveled state roads, pulling over onto the shoulder every half hour or so to take a photograph.

It’s difficult to make what he sees with his eye match up to what he sees through the lens, which is why he’d stopped doing this back when he was eighteen, so Ben is rather surprised to learn he has fun trying anyway. He keeps three shots out of about twenty: slats of early sunlight coming through a spruce bough, a black lake that reflects flame-colored maple trees on its bank, and a lighthouse overlooking the harbor at dusk.

“Well, nature photography does have its bucolic charms,” Hux comments. Strips of masking tape now mark the arms and seat to his office chair, each piece denoting a particular setting and written over with the word 'NO.' “Though I doubt there’s anything new to discover in a landscape already embellished by such minds as Thoreau and Frost – would you consider portraiture, as an alternative?”

“We’re revising the website,” Phasma translates. “We need some pictures for the autobiography pages, but Hux here harbors a profound distrust for professional photographers. Would you like to volunteer your creative services?”

“I can try,” Ben says.

He has Phasma pose beside her motorcycle, wearing black pants and a crimson jacket to complement the polished chrome. Hux alternates through five different backgrounds, twenty different facial expressions, though dressed in that same funereal attire he wears every single day. Eventually Ben gets a semi-decent result by telling Hux to pretend he’s a five-star general posing for his official portrait.

(Ben saves all the discarded pictures, however, so that later he can photoshop Hux’s head onto the image of somebody riding a jet pack. This is awarded a place of honor in the radio station’s break room.)

He also starts to bring the camera along on his distance runs, seven-or-eight mile loops through the city’s neighborhoods and districts. 

 “I think, ah – this one,” Rey says. She turns the camera towards him. Its display screen shows a street of brick townhouses, lined along both sides by enormous elms whose branches intersect to form a springing archway. “I like how the light and dark come together, in the shadows here. You’ve got a good eye for contrast.”

Ben covers his mouth with a hand until he’s finished chewing. Out of purely speculative interest, he has brought home a bulbous yellow squash which the farmer’s market vendor claimed would taste like spaghetti. The baked results are unusual, though not unpleasant, and he has told Rey – or reasoned to himself, as a semi-plausible excuse for inviting her over – that it’s too much for one person to finish.

 “Thank you,” he gets out. “I thought you’d like that one.”

“Did you take those, too?” Rey indicates two photographs he’s tacked beside the phone. One is of Leia, ten years younger and wearing a cobalt blue dress suit, while the other is that same old image of his father with the Falcon M1. “I’m guessing the lady is your mom, right? She’s got an amazing hairstylist.”

“No, she does it herself. I used to carry forty or fifty emergency bobby pins around in my pockets whenever I went with her to public events.”

(Ben had carried notecards with him, too, which he’d organized into potential talking points and rebuttals she could offer rude reporters, but Leia had never needed these. His mother managed to be the eye in every storm that passed over her, weathering each misfortune with an encompassing, kinetic serenity Ben could never learn to imitate.)

 “And who’s the dashing pilot, then? He looks a lot like you.”

“He’s my father.”

“What sort of flying did he do?”

“He was a bush pilot up in the Northwest Territories. I’d go along with him on supply runs during school vacations.” Ben chews again, wipes his fingers on a paper napkin. “Can your grandfather fly anymore?”

Rey pauses momentarily to scrape out her bowl.

 “No, the accident messed up his reflexes too much. I think that’s part of why he and my gran got separated, actually. He had a hard time accepting it. It took him a long time to – grow around the idea, I guess.” She smiles. Ben smiles back. “But now he does powered paragliding and parachuting, whenever he can. Don’t tell his doctors about that.”

“How do you suppose he would feel about you getting a general license yourself? Then you wouldn’t just have to pretend at being Amelia Earhart.”

“Mmm.” A long piece of the spaghetti squash whips Rey in the nose when she slurps it. “I don’t know. But I’d love to try. The Flying Masseuse, they’d call me. Maybe Finn can bring that Adonis look-a-like along, next time he comes to visit. Then we’ll all talk shop about planes and choppers and other unidentified flying objects – speaking of which, how’s that bird feeder?”

 Not well, he must admit. Rey has given him several sheets of scrap metal from the junkyard to fill in for whatever materials were blown away, but again there is some snarled thread between the picture Ben has in his mind and those broken pieces he lays out on the table every evening. Periodically he must stop to remind himself, with the diligent placidity of a carpenter pausing to straighten a nail, that these setbacks are more like experimentation than failure.

Usually, this rhetoric is effective. At other times he will put everything aside to read, or clean, or fit together a frame.

He stays late in the library one Friday night, flipping through books about metalworking – several more about photography, about training for half-marathons – until they close their doors at 9:00 PM. There’s a tallow-colored moon rising fast behind the buildings as Ben leaves.

And when he pulls into the apartment complex’s parking lot, around 9:15 PM, his headlights fall on somebody leaning up against the lamppost.

It’s Snoke.

Ben listens to the car’s engine idle for a minute, studying his reflection in its rearview mirror, before he gets out in one smooth motion and slams the door shut behind him. It sends a rebounding echo. He pockets his keys but keeps a hand tight around them, because the brass teeth digging into his fingers makes for a good focus point.

Snoke speaks first.

“I actually had half a mind to start looking for you in the obituaries.” Snoke laughs. “I mean damn, Ren. Didn’t your mother ever tell you it’s rude not to return somebody’s calls?”

Ben stares at Snoke, at the sunken hollows of his face and the gray translucence of his skin and the stark, carceral clarity of his bones even through the worn-out dark clothing.

“I’ve been busy,” Ben says. “Sorry.”

“Yes, I’m sure.” Snoke almost sneers, though with that scar he always seems to be sneering anyway, but the expression smooths itself over. Insects form a swirling galaxy around the dimmed lamppost above them.  “How are you enjoying that, by the way? I’ll bet the charade’s gotten a bit tiring.”

“What charade would that be?”

“And here I always thought you hated unnecessary questions.” His tone is easy and assured, the one he’d used most often shortly after they’d first met. It was a tone that had always made Ben feel as though he were speaking quietly, through the dark, to someone he had known since childhood. “So these new acquaintances of yours, or whatever you’d like to call them – how well would you say they really know you? Not as well as I do, I’ll bet.”

“No,” Ben must admit.

“Why not, you think?”

Ben doesn’t answer.

 Which is just as well, because Snoke has an answer prepared.

“I’ll tell you why, then. It’s because you and I have the exact same sort of mind. We understand each other, don’t we? Most people can’t see the world for – what did you call it, that one time? Shit, I had it a second ago and now I can’t remember. It was fucking great. Something about the opera, wasn’t it?”

“I called it a _pasticcio_ ,” Ben says. “It’s the loose and inauthentic adaptation of a preexisting work put together by multiple composers who weren’t working in coordination.”

“That’s it! That’s it. You called the world a _pasticcio_ opera in space.” Snoke laughs again. “God. I know I give you a lot of shit for the weird things you say, but hell if I haven’t missed it. Everybody else in this city is an imbecile, have you ever realized that? They see the world whatever way they want it to be, but you and I have always seen it for what it really is. It’s why we have so much in common –”

Here Snoke indicates the matching scars on their faces, an old and companionable gesture of conspiracy.

“—Don’t we, Kylo Ren?”

He waits.

And then Ben feels a disburdening relief begin to snatch at his limbs, to hook itself through him like wires, because after all he had never needed to do a great deal of thinking – about himself, about who he had once been and, eventually, who he could no longer be – while he was in Snoke’s company. It was easy. It was effortless. It was as much of a release as he could hope for, because it was as close as he could get to not existing without actually being dead.

Snoke was the one who first convinced him to speak with Rey, wasn’t he?

Yes, in fact. He was. Ben never would’ve done that on his own, because he didn’t have the courage. Snoke was the one who pushed him to it: Snoke who had promised him it was good advice, Snoke who never gave bad advice at all.

_(“ – Oh, your father, your father. Don’t start talking about him again. I’ll bet good money he never wasted this much energy on you. And that’s not your fault, I know. Some fathers never earn the loyalty of their sons. Mine didn’t. But I don’t call you by his name, do I? No, I respect you too much for that – ”_

_“ – Then I tried telling the joke you told me, last week, but obviously he didn’t get it because you could balance that man’s mind on the head of a pin.  I’m sure those stooges they made you perform for in college wouldn’t have understood it, either. Didn’t you once tell me how your uncle –”_

_“—Listen, have you ever heard of something called an alibi? I know they probably didn’t talk about those a lot, up in whatever blue-balls country club your mother brought you to, but I really need –”_

_“—All right, how many fingers am I holding up? No, wrong. Guess again. But I have to say, that was fucking hilarious. Everybody took bets. I bet on you, obviously, I knew you’d take that guy apart. Dumb asshole would’ve paid me back eventually, but I appreciate you stepping in. Here, I’ll let you count the winnings once you can see straight –”_

_“—No, you only lent me a hundred dollars. Aren’t you supposed to be a genius? Well, then, get a ledger. Or get a different dealer, at least. What, does he make it with battery acid? That could explain why your memory’s turning to shit. You’re lucky I have the forbearance to deal with you, you know that? Nobody else would even – ”_

_“ – Jesus, what are you sniveling about? I’ve never seen a grown man cry so hard around the silver spoon he’s got in his mouth. No, I don’t have a goddamn tissue. The foreman at that dock job said you have the impulse control of a fifteen-year-old. I didn’t know whether to be embarrassed more for you or for myself, since I was the idiot who recommended –”_

_“—I know, I know, no need to thank me. They should make me a saint. Saint Snoke, patron of temper tantrums and oversized children who can’t navigate their way out of an empty room. But really, with all the shit you’ve done? Come one, nobody else would want to spend five minutes in your company unless they had to. But you and I, Ren – ”_

_“—I’m the only one who – ”_

_“—You can never – ”_

_“ – Irredeemable fu – ”)_

Another gust of wind whips past, blue-black cold and carrying the smell of upturned roots. Snoke shudders at it, a convulsion that goes up his spine, but Ben does not.

And Ben does not, he realizes, because there is a warming, protective solidity to his shoulders and arms and chest and stomach that was not there a year ago, or even ten months ago, when he’d stood in his kitchen with shivering fingers wrapped around a lukewarm coffee cup.

He’d been holding himself as though his insides were full of new stitches.

Snoke, Ben thinks: Snoke who always remained unmoved by any high or crash or fifth-act peripeteia, Snoke who was wise and who spoke aloud the things Ben had been thinking all his life: the mollifying excuses, the recriminations, the self-hatred so complete that Ben always thought it would cycle back upon itself like an alchemist’s snake swallowing its tail and transform into something else.

Snoke, his friend.

_(“—Don’t we, Kylo Ren?”)_

Ah.

He takes an effortless breath. It goes to the bottom of his lungs, and the next voice Ben hears is, unexpectedly, his own.

“My name isn’t Kylo Ren,” he corrects. “If you can’t even manage to get that right, I don’t see how this conversation is going to lead us anywhere worthwhile.”

Snoke doesn’t seem to have an answer for this, but the change that comes over his face is so drastic it is as though a mask has been removed. Ben turns, jangling the keys cheerfully in his pocket, and moves to go inside.

“Goodbye,” he says, in parting. “Take care of yourself.”

He makes it seven long, swinging strides before Snoke calls out again.

“You know,” he hears, behind him, “you’re awfully goddamn sanctimonious for a man who killed his own father.”

Ben stops.

_(“– Hey, kid, you want me to drive now? We can switch at the next gas station. We’ll stop and get something to eat, if you want. Because you don’t seem all that pulled-together right now, honestly, and this – ”)_

The echo of Snoke’s voice carries far, sounding against the stained brick walls and the cold night air and the bare, creaking tree branches.

 _(“I’m fine,”_ Ben had snapped, which made it the first thing he’d said to his father that whole drive. He’d needed to speak loudly to be heard over the windshield wiper blades. “ _When are you going to stop calling me ‘kid’?”)_

Briefly, Ben is held motionless by the vivid image of taking Snoke’s head and smashing it against the asphalt until the effort has exhausted him, until something has cracked – Ben is fairly certain it will not be the asphalt. He feels his mind being drawn rapidly upwards out of his body, being compressed into some hard, darkened little space that narrows his vision like the eye-slits in a confining helmet.

He could do it, probably. He wants to do it. He wants, wants, wants to do it.

But he had tried to tell Rey something recently, hadn’t he?

Something about not putting anger first, something contrived about learning to grow around things, the way a scar will pull the edges of a wound back together if given enough time. Maybe Ben doesn’t quite believe it, just now, but he would hate to be guilty of lying to her.

Ben turns back around towards Snoke again and speaks.

“Damien, isn’t it?”

“I – what?” Whatever sneer Snoke may have had on his face immediately vanishes. “What the fuck did you just say?”

“Your name, shithead. It’s Damien Arthur Plagueis. You’re forty-two years old and you were born in Portland, Oregon.” Ben lifts his wrist, waves it demonstratively. “You should’ve covered up that tattoo. It’s the second thing police reports list under your distinguishing physical characteristics.”

“That’s none of your goddamn –”

“I see no reason why it shouldn’t be. My mind, your mind, right? But listen, here’s the most peculiar thing about all this.”

Ben walks towards him again, and he could swear he sees Snoke take a half-step backwards. It has somehow never occurred to Ben just how much taller he is. 

“When I read through those reports they released about the First Order, I kept thinking what a fantastic memory their informant had. You probably never even knew his name, but he certainly remembered yours – along with the four charges of breaking and entering, three charges of larceny, two charges of carjacking, two charges of unregistered firearms possession, and this single note about assault and attempted battery.”

In a replica of Snoke’s earlier gesture, Ben touches the scar on his face.

“Never tried that one again, did you?”

 (And the scar had not been created by a switchblade, as Ben has also learned, or by a piece of broken bottle-glass.

It had been left behind by a young man, a former lackey of Snoke’s, as a requisite part of his ascent into the higher ranks. He had done it with a thread-cutter, the kind used by tailors and seamstresses.)

Snoke’s lip curls back, the sneer of a growling dog. This was more or less the expression he had been wearing in one of his mug shots, although he’d been twenty years younger when that picture was taken. Or fifteen, or ten.

It’s hard to say.

“Stop bluffing,” Snoke declares. “You aren’t going to turn me in, you pretentious crybaby. Don’t pretend you even can – if you feel up to it, though, I’m sure I’ll have plenty to talk about with the police. Then at least I’ll know there’s some nice lady senator out in California who’ll have to explain how those charges of drug possession got added to her darling little fuck-up’s less-than-stellar record.”

Ben laughs.

“The state courts already know about it, at least,” he says. “It’s the conditions of their diversion program – you plead guilty to a judge before entering rehabilitation, and then any charges against you are dismissed once you’ve finished. I told my mother she should consider revising the penal code to include something like it. And if you’re talking about the media, I’ve dealt with worse.”

 “Listen to yourself,” Snoke says. “Ballsy all of a sudden, aren't you? What the hell happened? Did Little Miss Sunshine finally give you that pity-fuck you were –”

Consciously, with the tremendous and lucid deliberation of a chess player, Ben brings up his right fist and pounds Snoke across the jaw so hard its impact throws black spots in his own vision. Snoke staggers five steps sideways, bows over to spit blood from either a split lip or a bitten tongue. Ben keeps his fist clenched – sees that it is trembling, wants to swing it again – and holds his breath until the count of five as though between the lightning and the thunder.

That’s enough, he tells himself. That’s enough, that’s enough, that’s enough.

His fingers relax.

Snoke straightens up, one hand smearing blood down his shirtfront as he wipes his mouth. He coughs. Ben doesn’t move any closer.

“I’m sure there are many more sanctimonious ways I could’ve handled that,” Ben says. “And Regina doesn’t pity anybody, least of all me, but if you speak about her like that again I’ll still be obliged to finish what I started and knock out the rest of your teeth – If I ever see you around here again, I just might do that anyway.”

Snoke takes spent, exhausted breaths, like a tired bull, although he hasn’t done anything and quite likely he won’t despite how he is glaring.  Snoke’s eyes, Ben has always thought, are unusual in that they do not seem to have a color. The irises are not gray or blue so much as they are tinged like old glass, hardly distinguishable from the watery sclera around them.

Ben can see straight through them.

“Do we understand each other, Damien?”

“Yeah, sure.” Snoke gives an unsteady, condescending bow, and spits blood onto Ben’s shoe. “The great and powerful Kylo Ren hath spoken.”

“My name is Ben Solo.”

“Ben Solo, then.” He takes another step backwards, then another, not looking where he is going. “Call yourself whatever the fuck you want.”

“Thank you. That’s good advice.”

Ben watches Snoke’s retreating figure until it is swallowed up by the shadows.

He can feel his heartbeat all down through him as he stands there, hears the sighing breaths through his nose and the grinding of his teeth – which means, overall, that he remains engaged in the difficult, tiring, relentlessly personal business of being alive.

He goes up the stairs to his apartment. He takes off his shoes, one foot at a time, studying the half-dried spatter of spit and blood that covers the left toe, and cuts the shoe into pieces with a pair of kitchen scissors and an air of clinical detachment.

Then Ben uses the phone to leave an anonymous tip for the police, complete with a physical description – thinner, older, several fewer teeth – and three different addresses to check. He stares at those two photographs pinned above the phone while he talks and is thanked for his help before he hangs up.

Nothing may come of it, but it still strikes him as the right thing to do.

He passes the night watching shadows move on the wall.

 _(“I’ll probably stop calling you ‘kid’ whenever you stop calling me ‘old man,’”_ his father had answered. _“So, never.”)_

…

Then, inevitably, it is November.

Ben has never liked this time of year, damp snow and dying light. He looks around his apartment one day, at the old notes stuck to its cabinets and walls – the reminder to make himself regular meals, the reminder to call Leia, that list of activities he’d made back in April, all of them indicating amnesia or senility – and throws them away.

Gently, he takes down the picture of his father as well and puts it in a drawer.

_(“Dammit, kid, listen to me. If you don’t want to talk, fine. You don’t even have to look at me. But you can at least do me one favor and listen for five minutes –”)_

Phasma doesn’t care much for wintertime either. Cold air works its way into her badly-set, badly-knitted collarbone, which the baseball bat had splintered into three pieces rather than two, and it weakens the grip in her left arm so much that a lever-pull door handle can be unmanageable. Some days the pain makes her as snappish as a wounded animal. Hux, once forced to learn the merits of compartmentalization and rigorous, relentless suppression, cannot quite bring himself to be patient with her.

One night, over coffee and an abandoned game of blackjack, they have a disruptive row about the station’s budget and the new schedule and why they never have any fucking toilet paper in the downstairs restroom. Despite their numerous attempts at drawing him into the conversation, Ben does not dare offer an opinion.

“Oh, of course not,” Hux tells him, coolly, as Ben hastens to leave. “I suppose you don’t think you can afford to give the offense, do you?”

“Don’t you dare be petty, Huxley.” Phasma stands as well. “The man has more pressing personal matters to trouble himself with than your trifling disputes.”

Ben’s limbs go numb. He keeps a hand gripped on the back of his chair, his coat slung over one elbow, and suddenly it occurs to him: the reason Hux and Phasma have never asked a great deal about his past – he would’ve been honest, he would’ve tried to be – is because they already knew everything before they hired him.

Why not, though? They’re thorough. They’re professional. They’re attentive to detail. Ben has no right to safeguard anyone’s opinion about him, to obscure or to conceal who he is. They had surveyed his life, in documents and released reports and browser searches, and assumed he was in need of their sympathy.

Which, with equal honesty, Ben can say that he had been.

“Good night.” Ben puts this answer to both of them at once. “Thank you for inviting me here.”

Then he leaves, Millicent stepping blithely out of his way, and lets the door slam closed behind him. He pulls over at a gas station and must pace its parking lot for ten furious minutes to prevent himself from speeding on the way home.

_(“– I really don’t care what kind of neck-deep shit you’ve gotten yourself into. And look, I’ve never pretended to be a candidate for sainthood myself. You know that. So I’m telling you now, this is nothing we can’t work on together – ”)_

The shortening days mean he must run in the dark, mornings or evenings, although one day he cannot summon the motivation to get beyond the apartment’s fourth-floor landing. An embracing weight, like that of a lead-lined jacket – he has worn these before, many times, they shield you from enemy infrared scanners at night – drapes itself over him, making him feel  slow and listless, so he simply sits there for a while and then returns to his apartment.

The bird feeder repair project stalls because Ben cannot see his way around the problem of recurving its sides, or how he can bolt everything together. None of the pictures he takes with his camera are satisfactory, and the ones he took in October – the slanting light through a tree, the lake, the lighthouse, the elm-lined street –have grown dull and foolish when he examines them again.

He reexamines himself, as well.

Waking up as the same person each day, bathing the body that is no longer quite so loathsome in appearance but which still contains the same mind and heart, shaving that same face he is responsible for ruining, Ben begins to get the old, familiar sense of existing in separate and haphazardly-assembled pieces.

_(“– But you have to let me help you first, kid. You’re my son, and I love you, but you can be a real stubborn jackass sometimes. No need to ask who you get that from – so first I need you to meet me halfway there, got it? I need you to ask me for help. Ask once, that’s all I need to hear. You ask me that, and I’ll do anything you need me to. I swear on my life – Ben, at least look at me for a second. Ben? – ”)_

“Ben?” Leia asks, over the phone. “Are you still there?”

Ben startles as though a spider has been dropped down his back. He’d been nodding in answer to a question, forgetting that his mother cannot see him and has not seen him in four years.

“Yes. I’m still here.”

They are talking about Christmas, he remembers. They are talking about the future. He is calling her now so that she will not worry, so that she knows he has not shut her out again or disconnected this number, because earnest concern is likely the most positive emotion Ben will ever be able to make his mother feel.

The thought stings his throat and his eyes.

“So how is Uncle Lando doing?” Ben forces. “Is he back in the States again?”

“He’s well – but you don’t sound it.” Leia hesitates. “You can come home for Thanksgiving too, if you’d like. Can you get the time off from work? I’ll have Mr. Thrépio book you a flight for the –”

“No,” Ben says, harsher than he intends to. He stares down at the scrambled eggs he has made himself for dinner and finds that the smell sickens him. “Please don’t do that. It’s too expensive. I’m fine.”

_(“Ben, could you just – All right, all right, fine. You don’t have to look at me. That’s all I wanted to tell you anyway. We love you, we miss you, and we want you to come home if you’re ready. I came all the way here to say that.”)_

Punctual as ever, Rey knocks on his door one night to invite him over for herbal tea and mindless action movies.

“A peculiar combination,” Ben observes.

“I like to think of it as a harmonizing balance.” She idly tugs at her bracelet, made from braided pieces of scrap fabric. “Do you want to come?’

Ben stares at the bracelet twisted around her fingers, at the different colors she’s selected and how they fit together. Well, naturally. Rey likes collecting scattered pieces, discarded fragments and rusted halves, broken things that can be repurposed and made suitable for some second or third life – and suddenly there is another connection he has never made before, which should prove just how short-sighted he is.

Of course.

 “No, thank you,” he says. “And there’s no need for you to keep this up anymore. You’ve done enough for me already.”

Rey frowns as though he’s pricked her with a pin. “What?”

“I release you.” Ben makes a grand, casting-off gesture. “You’re free. I am no longer your salvage project.”

“I don’t – ”

Her eyes harden, but Ben is satisfied in an ugly, small way to see that it is with anger rather than sorrow.

“– That was a very unkind thing to say.”

Then Ben considers Rey, herself, with all that strength and warmth and brightness she gives out to others without any expectation of return, and knows he does not deserve it.  He does not deserve Hux’s and Phasma’s discerning sympathy. He does not deserve Leia’s abiding concern, or Sir Major-Commodore Kenobi’s humor, or Finn’s cheerful handshake and his perfect, saving memory, and above all he does not deserve Rey. Not her friendship, or her laughter, or her sorrow, or the privilege to kneel at her feet. 

“I’m not a particularly kind person,” he answers, and something in his heart goes taut like a dropped noose. “If you haven’t noticed yet.”

“I haven’t, actually. But I won’t tell you how to think.” Without further pause or ceremony, Rey turns to go. “Have a nice evening.”

The crash of her door fills the empty hallway.

Ben shuts his own door as well, anger buzzing in his brain, and glances around at the apartment’s walls and bare lightbulbs – only to find, as usual, that there is nothing he really wants to break or hurt or damage here except himself.

 He settles for taking out an old bedsheet and ripping it into long, vicious shreds, though it takes much longer for his arms and shoulders to tire than it would have back in January.

_(“– Hey, kid, you want me to drive now? We can switch at the next gas station. We’ll stop and get something to eat, if you want. Because you don’t seem all that pulled-together right now, honestly, and this – ”)_

And Ben understands perfectly well what is happening to him, as he slides backwards into himself as though down the steep side of a pit, but resolves that he should make no further effort to arrest his descent. He doesn’t fear a relapse, in any medical sense of the word, and he will most certainly keep that promise to Damien if given any cause.

That’s not the problem here.

_(“I’m fine. When are you going to stop calling me ‘kid’?”)_

But he has been forgetful lately, Ben acknowledges.

This past year has diverted him from his purpose, from the reason he first reconciled with the idea of living at all. He has been allowing himself to believe he deserves normalcy, or something approaching happiness, which is not a usual or acceptable part of penance.

So perhaps this is really for the better.

_(“I’ll probably stop calling you ‘kid’ whenever you stop calling me ‘old man.’ So, never.”)_

Then Ben Solo wakes up on the morning of November 21st to see that it is 4:32 AM, which means he has been thirty-one years old for exactly an hour – which also means that tonight, at 11:37 PM, Han Solo will have been dead for exactly two years.

He lies there with his hands held over his face for a long, long time.

At 8:05, Ben calls in sick to work, and his voice cracks while telling some transparent lie about the flu and the attendant possibilities of contamination. Hux pauses before responding.

“It’s Sunday, Solo,” Hux says. “You don’t work on Sundays, to the best of my knowledge – unless this is your covert way of offering to pick up additional hours, that is. We don’t pay overtime, remember, but there’s certainly enough to do around here.”

“Oh.” Ben covers his eyes again. “No. Never mind.”

“We expect you here on Monday as usual, however,” Hux insists. “The variable capacitator isn’t going to fix itself.”

Sympathy, professionalism, the lowest common denominator. Ben shouldn’t take any of it personally.

“Right. I’ll be there.”

At 8:15 AM, Ben lies down and falls asleep without intending to.

He dreams of snatching Lor San Tekka by the dusty robes, lifting up that toughened and thinned body so weightless it had seemed as though the bones were hollow, but when he brings the silver-bearded face up close Ben can see that the man he holds is his father.  The sound of an exploding grenade transforms into the sounds of screaming brakes and twisting steel and shattering windshield glass.

Ben wakes again to see that it is only 10:24 AM, and that heavy, large-flaked snow has begun to fall outside.

He lurches to his feet. His heartbeat is stuttering and erratic and raised so high in his throat that it chokes him.

What should he do? Something useful, something practical, something mindless that will take him out of the present temporarily. He settles on washing dirty dishes in the sink, because he’s done that many times before. He should be able to manage it. It should be safe.

Hot water pours over his hands. He cleans a plate, several forks, and a dirty iron skillet. Last he picks up a water glass, which slips out of his hands.

Ben watches it fall. 

The sound as it shatters is needle-sharp, blindingly bright, passing cleanly through his skull like a shaft of sunlight.

(It had not been snowing that night, Ben remembers, but it had been raining, in squalls so heavy they swept curtains across the road. It drummed uniformly and intensely upon the car’s roof, though it stopped like the measured beat of a poetic caesura as they drove beneath bridges.

And had Ben been any less reckless, or less caged and shackled by his own anger, or less like himself – impossible wishes, all – he would have agreed to let his father drive, or at the very least would have slowed down on the highway exit ramp that curved so sharply around it resembled a hook.)

Ben stares at the pieces of glass on his floor a moment longer and then reaches laboriously down to gather them, one by one. Maybe he can put it back together again.

One, he counts. Two. Three, four, five, six, and abruptly he hears himself starting to laugh.

Why not, though? It’s funny.

Maybe he can put it back together again, maybe-maybe-maybe, though it is in a half-hundred pieces and he is the one who broke it in the first place. Really, it’s hilarious. Everything about this, about his life and his efforts for the past year, is absolutely fucking hilarious, and for about the same reason. 

As he gathers the seventh shard, the rest collected in his fist, he feels a bite of pain against his palm. His laughter grows ragged. When Ben uncurls his hands he can see that he has cut himself, so now there is blood on the glass and on his fingers and slipping down his wrists.

Maybe he can put it back together again, yes.

And here is a hypothetical scenario, not unlike the hypothesis describing an expansion of energy from one central, original point to which there can be no return. Here is what putting it back together would entail:

A single-engine plane, now sitting under canvas tarps inside a darkened hangar, instead heaves itself off the runway and clips the high treetops as it flies. A dog with silver growing through his brindle-colored fur follows dutifully and expectantly after a man whose hair has turned completely silver as well, a man whom the dog considers to be his oldest and truest friend. His mother stands at the mirror, and there is a man behind her to hold one final lock in place while she winds her braids into a crown.

 _(“All right,”_ the man says. _“Will that be all, your worshipfulness?”)_

And now Ben is disgusted, too, because now he is crying.

Not quietly, either. He doesn’t have the dignity for that and never has – he cries in weak, noisy sobs, breathless gulps and gasps, like a tired old man or a young child.

Glass grinds beneath his feet when he takes several steps across the floor, on legs that no longer seem sufficient to support his weight. He passes by an empty chair and instead presses his back against the wall, as his legs give out, sinking down slowly and drawing up his knees before burying his face in a sleeve.

(Afterwards, despite photographic evidence included with the insurance claim, Ben would not be able to remember passing through the guardrail.

He would not remember the back tires swinging sideways on the wet road, or their spectacular barrel-roll down the embankment, or the tree that finally caught the car against its trunk, or the windshield as it cascaded out of its frame, though he would remember all of the accompanying sounds as precisely as though they were notes to a song.

What Ben would remember, in the place of all this, was the sound of his own voice, once everything else grew quiet again except for the rain.

 _“Dad?”_ he had asked, twisting the driver’s side door open, though he could not tell up from down and so had fallen flat in the mud. _“Dad, Dad, Dad.”)_

He needs to stand up, Ben tells himself.

He had thought it then, with the rain hitting his face, and he thinks it again now. He needs to stop the bleeding of his hands and wash them. He needs to pick up the glass, to throw it away, to turn off the running tap. He needs to stop crying before somebody hears him.

Except, as a tapping by his ear confirms, it is already too late.

_B-A-D-D-A-Y?_

And who else would it be?

Bad day, Rey means. She must be down on the floor, beside her desk, one ear pressed against the wall. Once more he has disturbed her work, has likely disturbed her in several other senses too.  Isn’t she supposed to be angry with him?

 _Y-E-S,_ Ben spells out. For whatever it is worth, which is nothing or very near to it, he adds, _S-O-R-R-Y_

Her answer comes almost before he’s finished.

_H-E-L-P?_

Ben thinks.

If he were a strong person, or even a good person, Ben knows what his immediate and unhesitating answer would be: _no_. This is his weight to carry, his guilt to bear, and in the back of that goddamn ambulance last year he’d decided he would carry it for as long as was asked of him. He had said it wasn’t her business, and doubtless Rey regrets it didn’t remain that way.

And Ben has done this to himself, hasn’t he?  Yes, of course.

He has done this with his own choices and vices and whatever else has made him into the person he is. He is weak, and selfish, and vicious-hearted, and no differences he can make to his life from within or without will ever change anything. A man who killed his own father ought to understand that.

So Ben does not have any right to ask for help, least of all from this woman who has built her own life so carefully and has her own future and deserves every good thing that might be ahead of her. If nothing else, he does not have the right to be wailing so fucking loudly. 

He makes his choice.

_N-O_

Then Rey’s next answer comes not from the wall, but from his front door. She knocks three times, hard, even though the door is unlocked.

“Ben? Ben, can you hear me? I’m sorry, I just thought you were taking too long. I thought I should – really, though, do you want some help?”

“No,” he calls. He can’t even keep his voice steady. “I want to be left alone.”

“Ben,” she repeats, her own voice sharp, “we both know why that doesn’t work.”

He stares at his hands.

The bleeding has slowed, though it has not stopped. His cut palms and fingers have begun to sting. The sink’s faucet keeps running. Glass sparkles on the floor, and Ben needs to stand up so he can fix all of these things as best as he can, but if he is being honest – honesty is hard, honesty is necessary, honesty is all he has to offer – he does not possess the strength to even get his legs underneath him again. Contemplation of such an effort is, by itself, exhausting enough to make him give another heaving sob. Ben bites his sleeve to muffle the noise.

_(“…So I think healing is just about how you decide to untangle the knots.”)_

Weak, he knows. Selfish. Vicious-hearted. But he can’t stay sitting here like this forever.  

“Okay.” Ben forces a breath. “Okay.”

“Can I –” Rey stops herself. “May I come in, please?”

“Yes.”

Rey must be walking on her tip-toes, or else on the sides of her feet, because she slips through the door so quietly that Ben hardly hears her. She stops short when she catches sight of him.

“Should I call anybody?”

“No, I only cut my hands,” he says, holding up his long palms and fingers to show her. “Superficial.”

“Do you need some bandages, then? I have a box of different sizes. They’ve got stupid jokes on them, but they’re the antibiotic kind.”

“Don’t bother. I have a first aid kit in the bathroom.”

Rey steps around the shards to go turn off his running faucet. She wears clobber-heavy work boots, jeans and a too-large flannel shirt, because even with the radiators turned to their highest settings these apartments are always cold. Another piece of glass crunches under her heel.

“The floor’s probably not too comfortable. Can I help you up?”

“Not yet.”

“Do you want me to get a dustpan and brush for the glass?”

“I’ll deal with it later.” His nose drips, unattractively, so he wipes it with a thumb. “I don’t want you getting hurt anyway.”

“I think I can handle myself, thanks.”

“I know.”

Rey studies him.  Her shoulders go back, that same spring-loaded, preparatory motion she used before, as though she stands on the edge of something high and is gathering her courage to jump.

“Well,” she tries, once more. “Do you want me to sit with you, at least?”

Ben presses his lips together, mortified that he cannot seem to stop crying in front of her – a man of thirty-one, with nobody to rightfully accuse or to hate but himself, but still weeping helplessly nonetheless – then slides over along the wall and nods once. Rey settles down beside him, far enough away so no part of their clothing will touch. She draws her legs up close to her chest and wraps her arms around her knees.

“So,” she starts, “what is it?”

He looks at her, sees that she is not looking at him, then turns his eyes forward to stare at the broken glass and the walls and the windows which fill this room with gray light. The drifting snowflakes outside cast dim, fluttering shadows. 

“My father,” Ben takes another breath, “was killed in a car accident, two years ago today. I was the one driving.”

What follows is a purified, potential silence, like that inside an empty cathedral or the curve of a great bell, during which neither of them moves or exhales. Then Rey says, simply:

“All right.”

All right, Ben repeats. All right.

“I hadn’t been home in two years, at that point. I spoke to my mother over the phone maybe once a month, and I’d tell her these nebulous plans of visiting the next chance I had, but I always knew I was lying to her – I didn’t know I was an addict, though. Not then. I assumed I was too smart for that.” Ben laughs. “Damien agreed with me.”

“Who?”

“Damien. Snoke. That’s his real name.” Light glances off his hand, so Ben sees a splinter of glass half-buried in his left palm. He pulls it out between his fingers but does not drop it. “Then I get a phone call around 9:50 one night, and it’s my father, telling me he’s landed at Corellia International Airport and needs me to come pick him up – he’d taken a commercial flight out here, non-stop from California.” He lets the sliver drop. “My mother knew something was wrong with me too, she’d probably guessed it first, but this didn’t have any of her tact behind it. My father told her what his plans were about an hour before take-off.”

“He didn’t want her to try talking him out of it,” Rey states.

Ben shakes his head. “She was the only one who could have.”

 (His parents had spoken of separation, from the time he was in elementary school until the time he left for college, and they fought with the brutal forthrightness of mountain rams colliding, but Ben knew it to be an immovable truth that Leia was both the drawing lodestar and the pulling gravitational force of Han’s life.

 _“—And get this,”_ had been the way his father’s favorite anecdote began, _“Your mother says she loves me, for the first time, and all I can manage to say back is–”_

If only he hadn’t been born so soon after they were married, Ben had often contemplated. If only his parents had been able to have a life of their own for a while longer.)

“What did you do, after your father called?” Rey asks.

“I had to go. I couldn’t just leave him there. It was starting to rain when I left, and by the time I pulled into the airport it was pouring. He – ah.” Ben clasps his hands together, as though around something he’s trying to catch. “I suppose I didn’t realize how bad I looked until I saw his reaction.”

 _(“Holy hell, kid.”_ Han had reached out to grip Ben’s shoulders, thin and sharply-defined as knife blades even through the heavy coat, before Ben had time to flinch away. _“What have you done with my son?”_

 _“He’s dead,”_ had been Ben’s answer, and he had not meant it as a joke at all. _“I killed him.”)_

“So I threw his luggage in the car and drove out with him. I wasn’t – I wasn’t on anything, then, it'd been a few days, so there wasn’t anything in my system, but I was angry enough that it felt like there was. I didn’t say a word for the first half-hour, which meant my father did all the talking. He said he had no idea what sort of shit I’d gotten myself into, but whatever it was he still wanted to – he said he wanted to help me, even if I was going to be a stubborn jackass about it. Diplomacy wasn’t really my father’s strong suit.”

“I guess that runs in the family,” Rey says. “What did you think, at the time? About what he was saying?”

“I thought he was full of crap. I wasn’t in much of a listening frame of mind, so I thought he’d only come out here to make himself feel better. So he could, I have no idea – assuage his guilt about what a disaster I’d turned out to be, as a son. So he wouldn’t have to shoulder all the blame of failing as a father, if he could at least say that he’d tried.”

He can hear the delicate, painstaking effort Rey makes as she chooses her words, the severe concentration of someone following one single thread through a complicated knot.

“I can understand why that idea would’ve angered you.”

“I let it anger me. And I was the one full of crap, obviously. All he wanted was to help me, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t even think to slow down on the exit ramp.” Ben skims his hands off one another in demonstration. “I sent us straight down an embankment going sixty miles an hour and bent the car halfway around a tree. The paramedics told me my father died of a broken neck, so at least I’d know that he – he didn’t feel everything else, afterwards.”

“Were you injured?”

“No.”

(His father’s cell phone had been intact, too, with only a crack across its screen, and this had been what Ben used to call his mother while he sat on the hood of a police car. The news crews wouldn’t be far behind.

 _“Han?”_ Leia had shouted. _“You promised you’d call me when you landed. And you’ll have to speak up, your reception is terrible – Han, slow down, I can’t understand you.“_

 _“Mom,”_ Ben had been bawling, _“Mom, I’ve – ”_

 _“Ben? What’s happened? Where’s your father?”_ )

“You didn’t go home for the funeral,” Rey says, and she does not need to make this a question either, but at the last moment her tone lifts nonetheless. “Did you?”

“No. I cleaned out whatever savings I had so I could send hi – to send the body back, so my mother would have something to bury. I told her I’d replace the car, too. But I didn’t go.”

He had provided the burial transit permit and the health officer’s certificate. He had signed his name unsteadily on documents attesting that his father’s casket was hermetically sealed, that it was placed inside an adult-sized airtray made of particleboard with the required six handles for stable transport. He had confirmed that both the destination and name of the deceased, clearly labeled alongside the waybill number, were indeed correct.

When they left him alone in the airport’s holding room, one last vestigial attempt at private human dignity, Ben had laid his head down atop the wooden box – too small, he thought, for the reality it needed to contain – and remained there until someone wearing gloves hauled him off. 

(And had he gone to the funeral, Ben knows he would’ve likely done something even more senseless and embarrassing – like throwing himself down into the fresh-dug grave, perhaps, while everyone stared at Leia as well as at him.

His father always said Ben had a talent for melodrama.)

“I didn’t think about killing myself, at first.” Ben rubs his wrists. “I thought – it was some pretentious excuse, about death being too easy if I could make living feel worse. Which I knew I could. I don’t recall too much about the next year.”

Rey studies his profile. Ben wishes she would go back to staring at anything, anything else.

“Then, last October, I checked our insurance policy again. They wouldn’t cover suicide, that’s a standard clause, but they would cover accidents – so I figured, if I planned it right, I could make an overdose look that way. I didn’t know why I hadn’t thought of it earlier.” Ben pulls at his fingers, individually, as though drying them with a rag. “No, that’s not true. I knew why. I kept wondering who would have to call my mother and tell her, afterwards. As much as I hoped she would sigh with relief, I wasn’t quite that self-deluded. But finally I decided – she’d get through it. She’d be able to see it was for the best.” 

“And that’s when you were in the back of the ambulance,” Rey finishes. “When they asked you what your name was.”

“I thought about what my father had said.” He rests both hands on his bent-up knees. His legs are beginning to cramp. “I thought, well, if I was going to live anyway, if that’s what I’d decided after all, I should do him one final favor and not make such a complete shit-show of it.”

“Ben, that accident wasn’t – ”

“Don’t say it wasn’t my fault.” Ben’s tone is hoarse and echoing to his own ears, as though it is coming from the inside of a hollowed-out tree. He tries lowering his voice. “Please. I’ve tried that one a thousand times. It doesn’t work.”

“All right,” Rey says, again. “All right.”

Slowly, the quiet settles back into place.

And Ben is looking forward, from within the darkened cell of his mind, so he does not see Rey move until he watches her hand – small, callused, firm-gripped with green nail polish – reach out and come to rest very lightly atop his own.

He cannot see why she would ever choose to do this, because his hands are still covered in his own drying blood, but Ben does not pull away.

 _(I’ll do anything you need me to,_ Han had said. _I swear on my life. We miss you, we want you to come home, I came all the way here to say that, you’re my son and I love you._

_I love you, I love you, I love you.)_

“How about this one, then,” Rey says, in her same fastidious, unknotting voice. “If you’d – if you’d died, that night, instead of your father, nothing would be any better now. Nobody would be any happier.”

This, Ben must admit, is a thought he has never had before. His whole life seems to have gathered inward and compressed itself to fit those warm places where Rey’s hand touches his skin.

“What?”

“I’m good at dealing in hypotheticals.” She taps a finger against his large knuckles. “The first few years after my mom left, I’d picture all these different ways we’d find each other again – I’d be walking down a crowded street and think, the next corner I turn, she’s going to be right there at a bus stop waiting for me. Or they’d call me out of class, at school, and I’d imagine her sitting in the administrator’s office wearing a new dress. The person knocking on the door, that’d be her. For some reason I always imagined she would have a bouquet of flowers in her hand when she came back.”

Ben turns his head to see that Rey is smiling at him, somewhat sadly, and it crowds into his heart.

“Well, anyway. All that’s just to explain why I’m particularly qualified when it comes to talking about probable impossibilities.”

“I’m sorry it’s a talent you needed to have.”

“Nah. It comes in handy, now and then. At least it means you can take my word when I say nobody’s life would be better, if you’d died.” She still hasn’t moved her hand. Neither has Ben. “I wouldn’t – well. I never would’ve gotten that cumbersome writing desk up the stairs, for one thing. Nobody at the junkyard would’ve ever heard of Gershwin or Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto. I definitely wouldn’t know what dark energy is.”

“Tragic losses, all,” Ben says, with vitriol. “I don’t know how the fabric of space and time could’ve borne the alteration.”

Rey squeezes his hand.

“And your mom, she would’ve thought about you every time she went to grab for something simple like a hair pin. She would’ve – she would’ve seen you any time she looked at your dad. She would’ve seen you everywhere.” She hesitates at her next words. “I bet your father would’ve imagined you in the copilot’s seat every time he flew that little plane.”

“The old man couldn’t have flown it for much longer anyway.” Ben shakes his head. “He’d have tried, though. _‘Never tell me the odds,’_ that’s what he always said. If there was one chance in a million something might work, he’d take it as a foregone conclusion that it would. He told me it was the expression of his rugged individualism. I told him he was just atrociously bad at statistics.”

Rey snorts in laughter. Ben, tears still on his face, lifts their intertwined hands. He turns his hand around lightly to support Rey’s palm and fingers from beneath.

“When we were, ah, when we were flying the Kessel Run, in Canada –”

“Wait. That was _you_?”

“That was him, anyway. Twelve hours, five minutes. I was just the navigator, which really meant I gave suggestions so he could ignore them. He wanted to take a shortcut through a ravine –” He guides Rey’s hand downward, the swooping gesture of a paper glider, and she laughs again. She flattens her hand and sticks out her thumb like a tailwheel. “—Pilots usually avoided it, because the turns were so sharp, and you’d have to get back out again by going up this sheer cliff face in a plane with gravity-flow fuel cells.”

“What? Is that bad?”

The ravine had been deep, too, its sides made of limestone and granite carved away by a nameless, twist-spined river. They had been flying low enough that Ben could look down and see patches of white wildflowers clinging to the rocks.

“It means if you climb or descend at too sharp of an angle, the engine stalls out. But my father just throws the dual selector valve into third position and guns us straight upward anyway – and to keep the fuel lines engaged he had to roll over, at the same time, like a corkscrew. We’d probably made three full rotations by the time we passed the rim of the ravine.”

He angles Rey’s wrist now, lifts her arm into a steep climb, and with his other hand he draws an ascending spiral around it.

“I’d bet him ten dollars we were both going to die. I only had to pay him five, after that, because I explained how the terror by itself had probably taken a good fifteen years off my life.” He lets her hand go. “My father never knew when to give up on anything.”

“He didn’t give up on you, either.”

“No,” Ben says. “He didn’t.”

And Han had been laughing, Ben remembers. The engine’s roar had risen to a howl, he had been gripping the straps belted across his chest, but his father had simply paused to take off his sunglasses and slip them into a breast pocket. Under Ben’s seat, a metal box containing ice packs and a navigational compass and an aviation flashlight had rattled.

_(“Never tell me the odds, kid. Don’t you trust me?”)_

 “So he wouldn’t want you to give up on yourself.” Rey straightens her legs. “He’d want you to have a future where you could let yourself be happy, someday. That would be how you – not did him a favor, I don’t think, but that would be how you honored him. How does that sound?”

“That doesn’t sound like something I deserve.”

“Maybe not, but your dad wanted it for you anyway.” Then Rey rocks forward, rises to her feet, turns around to help him stand. “I don’t think anybody can really deserve that kind of thing – that’s the whole point. Right?”

Ben doesn’t answer.

If he had felt compressed within himself, before, his mind now seems to open and expand until it can accommodate everything that has happened to him in the past year.

This includes the plastered holes of his apartment, the broken glass on its floor, the half-made bird feeder, the photographs with their sharp contrasts and his now thoroughly-battered running shoes. It includes the things in his closet, too, the scorched black scarf and the flashlight and the taped-up cardboard box.

Then he thinks of that fading tattoo half-hidden on Finn’s wrist, the way he had offered it forward to shake hands anyway. He thinks of Phasma’s pain-stiffened arm and her crossword puzzles, of Hux’s champagne glasses filled with sparkling cider and the helmet inside its glass display case. He thinks of his mother’s voice the first night he called her, after being silent for so long. He thinks of a man, also named Ben, whose broken body had betrayed him, and so he had stubbornly relearned how to use it. He thinks of Rey’s lock picks and her wind chimes, of her untangling healer’s hands and the torn tissue paper in her lap.

He thinks of his father.

_(“I’ll probably stop calling you ‘kid’ whenever you stop calling me ‘old man.’ So, never.”)_

 “Yes,” he says. “That sounds about right.”

Rey is still offering him her aid, but Ben manages to stand on his own despite pins and needles in his feet. It has stopped snowing outside, wet flakes stuck to the dark trees in a way that sharpens rather than blurs their details, and his watch tells him it is 11:05 AM.

“You go take care of yourself,” Rey say. She opens a cabinet below his sink with her foot, searching for the dustpan. “I’ll pick up this glass.”

He nods.

Ben considers leaving the bathroom light switched off, but decides to turn it on and shuts the door behind him. He twists the taps, waits unsuccessfully for the temperature to even out, so he stands there and holds his hands beneath the shushing, clear-cold water until all of the blood is gone.

He stares at his face in the mirror while he does. He can find no silver-gray hairs, still, but then he smiles broadly and something seems familiar. 

“All right, old man,” Ben tells himself, aloud. “I trust you.”

He’s rifling through the first aid kit for a second, larger bandage – his hands are greasy with antibacterial ointment, everything is disorganized – when he hears the phone ring twice. He settles for a half-empty roll of medical gauze and some sticking tape, instead, binding it around his sliced palm as he goes out, but he hears Rey lift the phone off its cradle before he gets there.

“Hello?...Hey! Hi, Mrs. Solo! Good morning….Sorry, I should’ve introduced myself. I’m Regina Kenobi. I’m a friend of Ben’s. I’m his neighbor, actually. I just stopped by to visit him.”

Ben gives the gauze one last turn before fixing it in place. Rey has gathered the glass into a pile, and her back is turned towards him.

“No, he’s all right. Everything’s fine...What? Really? It is? Oh, dear, he didn’t tell me, the big sneaky bastard…Yes, of course you can. I’ll get him on the phone…He’s here with me now, actually...”

Rey turns around, sees Ben, and smiles.

“…I’m looking right at him.”

…

Many things happen in December, as things tend to do, and it would be a great shame to exclude or omit or to miss out on any of them, but for now here are some of Ben’s particular favorites:

Rey is scheduled to sit for her final MBLEx licensing exam on the first Sunday of the month, and the night before she presents Ben with a stack of flash cards held together by a rainbow-colored hair tie.  All of them have been written in antique blue fountain pen. Ben goes through them twice, prompting her while they finish off a pot of vegetable stew.

“The Trager Method uses movement exercises called –”

“– Mentastics.”

“Adhesion development and excessive scarring following trauma can be prevented or reduced with – ”

“The Friction Method.”

“Fibrous tissue between muscle bundles is called – ”

“Fascia.”

“Inflammation of a vein is called – ”

“Phlebitis.”

“Bless you,” Ben says, graciously. 

The testing center is fifteen miles down the interstate, on which mopeds are prohibited by state law, and they spend twenty minutes looking through different bus time-tables before Rey asks if Ben can drive her there instead. The test begins at 7:30 in the morning, she warns, so they’ll have to embark at the ass-crack of dawn, and she tends to chatter when she’s nervous.

This is not why Ben has reservations, but he puts the thought aside and agrees.

 Fresh snow falls overnight. Their feet leave tracks over unplowed places in the parking lot, and Rey whomps Ben in the head with a snowball while helping to brush off his car windows. The eastern sky is just beginning to lighten, the roads are almost empty, everything looks clean and new in the snow and pre-dawn shadows.

And sure enough, Rey talks through the whole drive; she sits with both feet flat on the floorboards, hands placed primly in her lap like a schoolgirl, and is trying to expound the principles of energywork to him when they arrive at the center. They’re ten minutes early, so the doors are still locked.

“It’s not massage therapy, specifically, but there’s a lot of overlap in the theories and thinking. It claims there are all these, um, energy currents, flowing through different points on the body – in China the points are called _‘meridians.’_ Or _‘nadis,’_ in India? Yeah, that sounds right.” She finishes her coffee as though pounding back a shot of whiskey. “And then those currents are what create a body’s aura. So when pain or something makes a current get interrupted, you can become imbalanced.”

“Energy currents?” Ben turns off the car, eases his grip on the steering wheel. “So it works like an electromagnetic field, then.”

“Maybe. How does an electromagnetic field work?”

“The same way you just told me human auras do. It’s formed whenever charged electrical particles are set into motion.” Ben gestures, though his arms are long and the car is small. “If you mapped it out you’d see how it creates all these force lines, connecting positive and negative – I can show you.”

 Ben leans over to exhume a pen and piece of scrap paper from his cluttered glove compartment, and then uses the dashboard as a drawing table. His sketch shows two opposing charges, linked by circulating, symmetrical arrows that move between and around and over one another like the hoops in an astrolabe.

Rey takes the pen, and beside his picture she draws a human body in the anatomical position – stopping to add a smile on its face, naturally – with arrows moving in circulation through points between the limbs and the heart, the lungs, the kidneys and the stomach.

They survey each other’s illustrations.

“You know,” she taps the pen against her chin, “all the diagrams in my textbook showed aura as these multiple layers around a person, like it’s some sort of glow, but this makes much more sense. It works like a circuit.”

“Or a web of strings,” Ben points out. “Then you can find where the knots are.”

“I’m still pretty fond of our dark energy theory, though.” Rey checks her test admission ticket for the eighth time, as though suspecting it has somehow vanished from her purse, which gives her a reason to turn away. “I might’ve read this while I was helping Grandad fix the CB, so I could be wrong, but – a radio wave is an electromagnetic force, isn’t it?”

“Yes. So is sunlight.”

This delights her, for whatever reason, and she walks into the testing center with both arms held out as though tracing something through the air. Just before turning to go inside, Rey turns back and spreads her hands open towards him – not as though saying goodbye, but as though indicating some sort of current moving between them.

To indulge her, Ben sends the same motion in return.

He sees no point in wasting time or gas on two thirty-mile trips in the same day, so instead he leaves the car parked where it is and walks several blocks over to the public university. Their admissions office has been decorated with hanging golden lights and silver tinsel. Ben sneaks in to abscond with an undergraduate course catalog – they’re free, stacked by the door, but it feels like absconding nonetheless because everyone on campus is a good ten years younger than he is – which he reads through while sitting in a coffee shop. Along the catalog’s margins, Ben tries calculating how many credits he’d earned before dropping out of college as a junior.

Why had he done that? He had looked at the research paper he was writing one day, on theoretical physics, and decided in a fractious instant that he had no desire to even compose the next sentence, that none of it was useful to him, that he wasn’t very good at it anyway. Having his uncle as both his advisor and his professor didn’t really help to clarify things.

Still, he’d enjoyed it.

The thought comes to Ben with plain-dealing clarity, as he bookmarks a page using the diagram he’s drawn with Rey’s smiling illustration beside it. He should try to finish what he started, or else try a different approach and see what happens. The thought of going back to school now – he’s so old, it seems, though more inside than out – makes him shrink away, but then again it won’t be the most difficult thing he’s ever done.

Rey finishes her test at 9:45 AM. Ben stands leaning against the car’s hood when she walks out, so he sees that she has her head hung down. She’s tearing absentmindedly at the edges of her admission ticket.

“Well?” he probes. “Master Kenobi?”

“They gave me my score,” Rey says dejectedly, angrily. “I signed up for the computer-based test, so I’d know right away. I only got a 765. I need to take it again.”

“I’m sorry. At least now you'll know what to expect.” But then he stops, his arms caught in the action of something vaguely like reaching forward to offer her an awkward hug.  “I thought you said the passing score was a 630.”

“Yeah, but it’s out of 900,” Rey protests, in what sounds impossibly like genuine frustration. “I wanted at least an 810. Scoring a 765 is like getting a ‘B.’ It’s average.”

Ben runs a hand down his face, molding it into a frown, and shakes his head at her. His voice lowers by two octaves.

“Oh, my, that is a travesty. You should be ashamed of yourself.” He pushes off the car and walks forward until he’s directly in front of her. “Do you know what this deserves, Master Kenobi?”

Rey looks up.

And in one swift, easy motion, which would have been unfathomable a year ago and seems unfathomable even as he does it, Ben has swept one hand behind Rey’s knees and another around her shoulders and swung her crisply off her feet – then he runs across the parking lot and tosses her, shrieking, into a fresh snow bank.

“Ah! You fiddle-fuck!”

“On to the string instruments now, are we?”

She springs back up like a welterweight boxer and tackles Ben with such force it almost snaps his spine. They’ve dumped a few shovels-worth of snow down each other’s coats before a mildly interested testing proctor walks out and inquires as to who is being killed.

But Rey continues laughing, her cheeks and ears flushed pink as they warm up again in the car. Ben, who is laughing as well, attributes this to the cold.

 The next week he takes several free recipe cards from a rotating display rack at the supermarket, decides on the one with fewest ingredients – pork schnitzel, which he realizes too late sounds like a sexual innuendo – and does a test-run that comes out acceptably well.

And when he sees them together next, in the break room, Ben invites Hux and Phasma to his apartment for a Friday night dinner.

“My neighbor might be there too,” he adds, lamely. “The friend I told you about. I think you’d like her. She once made a joke that involved poisoning me with cyanide-laced almond coffee cake.”

Phasma stares at Ben for a while longer. Hux rubs his top lip with an index finger.

“That’s not a terribly bad idea, Solo,” he says.

“Do you mean the dinner invitation, or the assassination plot?”

“Well,” Phasma says. “We’ll have to judge you on your merits as a cook before we allow that to be a strictly either-or statement.”

Rey comes as his third guest, the way Ben had anticipated she would, so his kitchen table is rather cramped. They bump elbows, cross arms while reaching to serve themselves, but within five minutes things have gotten more or less straightened out. Hux arrives in his ubiquitous black shirt and pants, Phasma in a pristine white blazer and imposingly tall boots. Rey wears a long-sleeved woolen dress the color of maraschino cherries and a necklace of tiny, functioning lightbulbs, which she demonstrates at Hux’s request.

“Solo informs me you have something of a do-it-yourself mentality,” Hux says. “Would you agree?”

“Yes.” Rey flickers the tiny switch around her neck once more. “This is really easy, though. All you need is the lights and a button-cell battery.”

“I’m a bit more intrigued by your apparent nascent talents as a poisoner. Is cyanide your _modus operandi_ , or does your creativity expand beyond that?”

“Careful, Hux,” Ben warns. “You may not want an answer to that question.”

Rey winks at him and takes another hearty bite from her dinner roll.

“I’m a plants person, really,” she says, one cheek full like a squirrel. “Do you have any idea how many common flowers are absolutely lethal if a person ingests them? I’ve got a potted oleander growing in my bedroom right now – a nice, easy slide from delirium to death.”

“Appalling,” Hux appraises, immensely pleased and in a distinctly familiar tone of voice. “Clearly a psychopath.”

Ben pours himself more sparkling cider.

“Who, Rey?” he says. “Not at all. Psychopaths are singularly lacking in rational motives. Rey has a perfectly justifiable reason for everything she does. Isn’t that right, Rey?”

“So long as we’re making the distinction between justifiable and legal, I guess,” Rey volleys back. “One should always come before the other.”

Ben toasts her with the glass, feeling foolish but unable to help himself. “As the universal subsumes the particular.”

Rey seems pleased with this assessment, Ben sees, and they share a look across the table. Hux and Phasma share one as well, a mutual ascent of eyebrows, although Ben may merely be imagining this.

Hux then launches into a discussion about unproven but suspected poisoning cases throughout military history, beginning with Alexander the Great, to which Rey can contribute some cursory knowledge about strychnine seeds as a bogus alternative medicine. Ben, in his position as host, manages a successful redirection to the topic of motorcycles, dirt bikes, and whether or not anyone would like to take packaged leftovers.  

“Now, your accent, dear,” Phasma says, once the dinner plates have been cleared. She’s brought a tin of frosted gingerbread men for dessert.  “Where are you from? Ben mentioned that you had English roots.”

“Well – my grandfather comes from London. He’s in Arizona, now, but I lived lots of other places before I moved there with him. So you think I’d be better at answering this question.” Rey tilts her head. “I should just start saying that I’m from right here, wherever I am. What do you think? Too philosophical?”

“I think it’s a wise response, personally. Very – oh, what’s the word? Mindful. Very mindful. I believe it was Saint Augustine who said how divinity is a circle whose center is everywhere, wasn’t it? Or else it was Ralph Waldo Emerson. I could be wrong. The chaplin I once met was a somewhat dim-witted fellow.”

“It’s a clever idea, whoever said it.” Rey crosses her legs and adjusts her grip on a coffee cup. Ben had only owned one, so he’d bought a brightly-painted new set for the occasion. “I was sort of nervous, though, coming out here. The first thing I did was study a book on native birds and plants, because I didn’t know if I’d recognize any of them – but that was the good part, too.”

“I imagine it would be.”

“And Ben, of course. I got to meet Ben. That was a bonus.”

“I should’ve been featured in one of your books on the local wildlife.” Ben makes a frame with his hands, slightly unbalanced by the openness of her expression. _“_ And the description would read, _‘endangered species, highly elusive, approach with extreme caution.’”_

“We ought to put that on our website’s employment application page.” Hux submerges a gingerbread man in his coffee and bites off the arms. “Under _‘desired qualifications and traits.’_ It would be a quick way to sift out the nimrods who have no sense of humor.”

Rey taps the top of her head, which is a good seven or eight inches below all of theirs. “Or you could sort them by height and ignore anyone less than six feet tall.”

They carry on this way until around 9:00, when Hux departs. He suspects Millicent has been sneaking out for dalliances with an inveigling neighborhood tomcat, and he prefers not to leave her unattended for extensive periods of time. Rey accepts this explanation without the slightest sign of a balk.

She also notes the way that Phasma works her shoulder forwards and backwards, when she begins putting on her coat to leave soon afterwards. It appears as though she's trying to rehang a door on rusty hinges.

“You hurt yourself?” Rey asks.

Phasma shakes her head, smiling. “I’d say I took a more passive role in the process, at least literally speaking, but yes. Nasty old clavicle break.”

“Did they have to operate?”

“They did – put it back together with screws and rods, like a shop class. I was carrying around so much metal for a while that I tried sticking a refrigerator magnet to myself.”

“Did you ever get physical therapy to rehabilitate the soft tissue?”

“No, I don’t believe Outer Rim Penitentiary would’ve been much interested in putting state tax dollars towards that endeavor.”

“Huh! I bet. I think one of the guards I met in juvie used to work there. She was a total ass-pancake.” Rey smiles too, and taps her own arm as a guide. “May I see how high can you lift it, please?”

Phasma provides a demonstration. The arm, its muscles defined like coiled rope, won’t quite extend all the way up, and although her face is impassive her fist is tightly clenched. Rey reaches to help ease the arm back down, plies it gently at several other angles, and then prods Phasma’s shoulder with efficient, purposeful fingers as though searching for burls in raw wool or tangles in a ball of yarn. 

“I can look at this for you sometime, if you want,” she concludes, after a serious minute during which Ben never takes his eyes off her face. “Myofascial release can – uh, it’s this kind of sustained pressure massage, to target the connective tissue. It increases venous and lymphatic drainage in the muscles, so it might restore some range of motion and help you with your pain.”

“That would be very kind of you.”

“But if –” Rey draws both hands against her chest. “If it’s an older injury, the healing might hurt a lot. Only at first, though! Then it gets better.”

“I would expect nothing else, dear.”

Rey steps into her apartment and comes back again with a large, tied-up old sock, full of uncooked rice and lavender petals for scent. She explains how it can be used as a flexible heating pad when microwaved and then bids them both a good night.

Phasma examines the sock once Rey goes out. Fat little bluebirds have been cross-stitched all over it. 

“What an unusual girl,” she comments. “Quite remarkable, though.”

“Yes,” Ben says.

“She’s very fond of you.”

“She’s that way with everybody. Almost everybody – everybody she doesn’t end up kicking between the eyes, I think. You could probably divide the population of earth between people Rey would kill for and people she would kill. I’m lucky I didn’t land myself in the latter category.”

“No, I would say that you didn’t.” Phasma pats a hand on his shoulder and gives Ben another look he does not understand. “Dinner was lovely. I’ll see you on Monday.”

She leaves.

Ben paces once around the kitchen table, somehow smaller rather than larger even though it is now unoccupied. He takes out the scrap metal of Rey’s bird feeder, the wood, the screws, and tools, and then at last he opens a drawer and lays out the picture of his father before him. He works caught in the grip of a tight, steady intensity until his eyes start to itch, at which point he notices it is 1:15 in the morning.

He goes to bed and does not dream of anything.

Five days before Christmas, Ben calls the airline about his plane ticket: no, he explains, he does not want to cancel it. He wants to change it, please, to move the departure date twenty-four hours earlier, and would they be able to do that? Would there be any additional cost? No, he can pay that. Yes, thank you, thank you so much, this means a very great deal, have a happy yet tastefully nondenominational holiday. 

Then, four days before Christmas, he is rolling his clothes up to fit inside a backpack – a survival skill the army tried to teach him, about compressing large things to fit inside small spaces, compacting the heavy loads that one must carry over long distances – when a knock sounds on the door.

“It’s open,” Ben calls.

He hears Rey let herself in and comes to find her holding a package wrapped in brown paper, like the kind from a shopping bag. There are snowflakes traced all over it in blue marker. Its shape is lumpish and irregular, as though she’s padded it out.

“Happy Christmas,” she announces. “I wanted to give this to you before we both went our separate ways. I’m taking a train to Yavin Harbor so I can spend the holiday with Finn. Are you going home soon?”

“Today. In, ah – three hours.” Ben backs away a few steps, sprints to get a clean but torn-up pillowcase that he’s slid underneath the bed, and carries it to Rey in his arms. Sharp edges poke at the cloth as he sets it on his table. “I need to give you your gift, too. I’m sorry it’s not wrapped.”

“Oh, no, that’s okay! Would you like to open yours first?”

His hands move a delaying second behind his mind, as though he is bumping through a dark room and fumbling about for the light switch, but Ben still retains enough motor control to fold open the package Rey has set down on his table. He does not make a single tear in the paper.

He reveals an empty flowerpot with an envelope taped to its bottom.

“Thank you,” Ben says. “I may be missing the symbolism, though – Kafka, or Sesame Street?”

“Neither. Look inside.” Rey pulls out the envelope, shakes it vigorously near his ear. There is a noise like tiny beads shifting and sliding against its paper. “I had Grandad send them to me. It’s flowering bindweed.”

He stops, thinks, remembers: the valley, the mountain at sunrise, the climbing vines, Rey seated on the roof as she waits and waits and waits while surrounded by the white flowers that wait as well.

“From your house, you mean. It’s from the same plant.”

“Yes. You can grow it on the balcony.” She returns the envelope to the pot. “You’ll have to build a trellis it can climb on when you plant it in April. If you still want to plant it, I mean. And you should put it somewhere it can get lots of sunlight.”

(What should Ben tell her, now? That the gift is thoughtful but ill-suited to him, that there is no reason for her to give him a piece of her home – gathered, folded up, flown several thousand miles to reach him – to keep, that he shouldn’t accept it.)

“I can do that,” Ben tells her.

“That’s what I hoped you’d say.” Rey stands with her hands clasped in front of her, the dark hair loose around her shoulders. “Can I open mine now?”

“If you must. I’m sorry it’s not more polished, but I was worried I would run out of time. I should’ve bought you something instead.”

“I believe I’ll be the judge of that, sir.”

With observably steady, placid hands, Rey unbinds three knots in the torn-up pillowcase and spreads everything open at once.

She stares.

Sitting in front of her is a reconstructed bird feeder, made of wood and steel and metallic paint, held together with screws and sealed with a waterproofing finish to keep out the weather.

It has been formed into the crude but earnest and verifiably accurate shape of a customized Falcon M1 airplane.

“I’m sorry,” Ben repeats. He hurries to pick it up and explain what strikes him suddenly as his own unbearable conceit. “I couldn’t get it back together into a spaceship again, so I needed to try something with straighter lines. I originally wanted the cargo hold to pull out, here, so you could load the birdseed, but I would’ve had to make a hinge that stayed open. Its wings are supposed to be your feeder trays – they’re longer, proportionally, since the one I flew in had customized extensions to shorten our takeoff distance.”

Ben holds the feeder up by its steel wires, tethered at the nose and tail for balance, and turns the propeller lightly with his finger. It twirls around, but Rey’s finger stops it before it makes a full rotation.

“May I hold it?” she asks.

“I tried making as light as I could, so you could hang it easily.” Ben hands it to her. “And I included the flap and aileron gap seals. Those were meant to increase the roll rate, so I’m sure you can figure out whose idea that was.”

“Yeah, I probably can.”

Then Rey sets the bird feeder aside, walks forward, and once more she hugs him without saying anything.

She does it with a soft, sagging sigh, the sigh a person gives when they can finally put something heavy down or take the first deep breath after crying for a long time. Her head remains against his chest, her fingers curled loosely in the material of his shirt. Ben wraps an arm around her shoulders in response and, with rather reverential hesitation, cradles his other hand behind her head – then remembers too late where he witnessed such a gesture, time and again, remembers how his father would always rock his mother slowly back and forth at the same time, but he can’t move to reposition himself just yet.

“It’s perfect,” Rey says, pressing herself closer. “I think it’s the most perfect thing anybody’s ever given me.”

“I didn’t include the landing gear, either.” Ben wishes he could shut up. “It had fixed wheels and pontoon floats, so we could take off from a harbor or river if we needed to. Making them both was too complicated.”

“You made it for me, laser-brain,” she insists. “That’s why it’s perfect.”

“Oh.”

The next breath Ben draws is scented with the smell of her clothes and her hair and her skin, and a feeling clutches him hard around the throat.

Another hypothetical scenario:

If Ben were to draw back slightly, to tilt Rey’s head up while he bowed his head down over her –  he is so much taller than she is, and though he has done this before he has not done it in what feels like a very long time – then perhaps –

The thought goes blank as though a circuit has been broken and is closed off from him by white noise. His imagination does not extend that far beyond the realm of feasibility and advisability: because Rey is his friend, Ben knows, without the qualifiers _‘just’_ or _‘only’_ or _‘no more than,’_ since none of these fit her at all. He must do nothing to ruin that, or nothing more than he’s already tried.

(Odd, though, how it should be this moment – this moment, rather than all the others – that takes his love for Rey and hammers it home in one perfect, determinative swing, passing all the way through his heart or his mind or wherever else intangible realities are supposed to go.

And Ben accepts in the same moment that he will never undo this change, that she will never feel quite the same way about him or even realize what he feels for her at all, and that the latter fact has absolutely no effect on the former. They are two electromagnetic field lines which will never intersect, two quantum states that will never be superposed.

But that’s the whole point. That’s how it works.)

Smiling at her, Ben pulls away.

“I’m glad you like it, then,” he says. “If you ever end up earning that pilot’s license, you’re welcome to try flying the real thing. I’ll keep it running in the meantime.”

“I don’t know.” Rey’s eyes are bright. She is looking at him in the same odd, unsmiling way she did during that thunderstorm, months ago, while his flashlight was aimed at her face. “You would have to be my copilot if I did.”

“The fuselage only has a three-foot clearance.” Ben puts a hand atop his head. “I’d concuss myself the second we hit an air pocket.”

She laughs loudly, puts two hands over her mouth, and picks up the replica airplane with as much delicacy and caution as though it is a heavy-headed flower. And Rey leaves – although she turns on her heel at the last moment, dashes back across the room, and gives him a final one-armed embrace before she goes.

 “I’ll see you again soon,” she says.

This phrasing strikes him as peculiar, and her voice sounds as though it’s coming from the edge of a distant memory, but Ben still finds a suitable response.

“Of course you will.”

Rey closes his door behind her. For a moment Ben cannot move, because his whole body feels somehow incandescent and the overwhelming strength of it holds him immobile.

He waits for it to pass. It doesn’t, though he still returns to packing.

But ten minutes before he leaves, Ben takes out that duct-taped cardboard box from inside his closet. He cuts it open with a folding knife, pulls back the flaps to study its contents, and lifts out an old Air Force HGU-15/P helmet attached to a specialized toxic gas mask.

He studies his reflection in its darkened visor.

 (His name was _Anakim_ , to start, like the Canaanite tribe of giants named in Genesis, but Shmi had changed this at the same time she altered _Schreier_ to become _Skywalker_. She had reasoned that everyone would look twice at any boy who could wear so lofty a title, poor immigrant or not, and so Anakin Skywalker had been the only pilot in the 66 th who needed no nickname.

 _“Don’t look back,”_ had been Shmi’s favorite saying, and always said in pairs. _“Don’t look back.”)_

Ben places the helmet aside, reaches into the box again and lifts up a worn-out pilot’s jacket lying folded at its bottom. This had been the first thing his mother sent him, even before the letters.

In ceremonious silence, Ben slips it on.

It’s a tight fit across the shoulders, because Ben had grown up to be both taller and broader than Han, and it is slightly too short for his torso, but with another tug he clasps it shut and finds that it is very warm nonetheless. It still smells faintly like the beeswax Han had sometimes used to keep its leather from cracking, like pine needles and cold wind and the occasional cigarette he’d indulged in if Leia and Ben weren’t there to scold him.

(He will take the jacket off once he lands, Ben tells himself. It will be warmer at home, and he doesn’t think his mother is quite ready to see it again. Maybe she never will be.

But that’s all right, too.)

Ben hefts his backpack up, shuts off the lights, and leaves for the airport wearing his father’s coat.

The flight takes him from east to west, though backwards rather than forwards in time so that Ben must reset his watch once he lands in Sacramento. He spends eight hours seated beside an exhausted mother and a young boy, who asks him – after informing Ben that this is his very first flight ever, that he is seven years old, that he knows a thing or two about life and so don’t think he is a dummy – how planes can possibly stay suspended in the air when they are so very heavy.

Ben explains the dynamics of air pressure and lift, using his hands, because he’s too restless to fall asleep and too brimming-full of what he suspects might be happiness to keep silent.

“That’s kind of scary,” the boy says, when Ben’s explanation is finished. “I bet nobody thought it would work.”

“You can’t worry too much about the odds when you’re trying something new,” Ben answers. “That’s not what gets you off the ground.”

“I know that.” The boy munches a bag of chips Ben has given him. Ben doesn’t like chips. “So what about Santa’s reindeer? Do they fly the same way?”

“I’m afraid that’s classified information – Article Ten of the Adult Handbook, Subsection E. I’m sworn to secrecy.”

He takes one bus and one cab, an hour north, puts the jacket into his bag, and on an impulse Ben elects to walk the last mile or so through a gathering winter dark. His steps echo clearly, because the night is quiet and mild and almost everyone else in this neighborhood is already home. A bird he does not know the name for – Rey probably would, along with the trees and the dormant flowers – sends out a call from its perch on a roof.

When Ben comes to his own house he notes that they have left candles burning in the windows, tall white ones that can be seen from a long ways off.  As a child he had helped his mother light these, every year, taking each candle and carrying its flame over the ignite the next.

For a moment Ben feels his feet falter.

Weak, he thinks, one last time. Weak.

(Though perhaps it takes a particular sort of courage to accept forgiveness from others, without letting it bow you over in shame or weight you down with hollow, distinctly human questions about deserving it or not – and it takes another sort of courage forgive yourself, as well, impossible as this often seems.

_“Never tell me the odds.”)_

So Ben goes up, knocks on the door, and waits.

Leia answers it.

There is gray in her artfully-arranged hair where there was no gray before, Ben sees, new creases on her face, but her eyes are the same. They stare at one another without speaking while Chewie barks from somewhere inside the house, while Luke calls out to ask who has just arrived.

“You’re early,” his mother tells him, archly, and without pause she opens her arms. “We didn’t expect you here for at least another day.”

 “I’m late, actually. I’m sorry I took so long.” Ben steps across the threshold. “But here I am.”

…


	3. Chapter 3

…

January brings a cold snap so wickedly and wantonly severe that everybody reads it as an augury – farmers predict thin strawberry crops and later-growing corn while fishermen predict a good run of winter cod, sportscasters predict a quarter-final shutout while fortunetellers predict death and taxes as usual, and Ben predicts bursting radiator pipes in the apartment complex’s basement. He is not disappointed.

One night frost crystals form on all the windowpanes, like tatted lace, and in the morning Rey appears at his door with an invitation to come walk on water.

By now they’ve taken to leaving their doors unlocked and propped open whenever they’re both at home, so at least Ben has grown accustomed to Rey coming in here unannounced – for a second opinion about her job applications, mostly, and once for his opinion on the existence of Bigfoot  – but this is still rather unusual.

He regards her dubiously.

“Is that a riddle, or a joke?”

“It’s the bay.” She pulls a white hooded cowl over her head. Her hair has been tied into a braid beneath it. “It’s officially frozen over. The ice should be about a foot thick – the weatherman said this is the first time it’s happened in living memory.”

“I’ve always found that to be a rather odd phrase.” Ben shrugs into the black woolen greatcoat Leia has given him for Christmas, tugs on a pair of matching gloves and flexes his fingers. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of dead memory.”

“Me neither. That’d be an oxymoron, wouldn’t it?”

“Most likely.”

They drive down to the public beach, duck through a padlocked swing-gate, and leave no footprints in the pale, coarse sand made from glacial outwash and crushed shells. The air is brittle and tinted pink-gold, a few sharp stars still out overhead along with a fading moon.

Rey stands at the water’s edge before taking one cautious, provisional step onto the ice, her hand extended and clasped around Ben’s – though this stems more from a willingness to humor him, Ben knows, than from any real need of his assistance. They both pause, waiting, until at last Rey lets his hand go and leaves land altogether to take a second, third, fourth stately step forward.

The ice does not break beneath her.

She nods in satisfaction, waves for Ben to follow her. He does. Sunrise spreads the shadows long behind them as they walk.

“Okay, stop here,” Rey says, after they have gone out past the docks and buoys into the deeper frozen harbor. She hooks him by an elbow. “Right here.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“You once told me Takodana Bay was the farthest you could get from home without going into the Atlantic.” Sun flashes off the ice, so Rey shields her eyes with a hand. “But here you are – mission accomplished. What do you make of it?”

The morning is so ringing-clear that Ben can look out towards an encircling arm of the bay and see chimney smoke rising from the rooftops there. It is just early enough that the bay’s distant lighthouse still flashes, every forty seconds, where the land changes to bare rock before finally dropping off into the water. Two brown birds with angular, white-banded tails are circling and diving like dragonflies overhead.

“It’s not what I imagined, I’m glad to say.” Ben cranes his neck up towards the birds. “What are those?”

It takes Rey a moment to follow his pointing finger. “Storm petrels, maybe? Yeah, I’m pretty sure.”

They traipse about for ten more minutes before their toes and faces grow numb, although the traipsing is mostly on Rey’s part. Ben remains a few steps behind, taking swift and loping strides that make the black tail-ends of his coat flap histrionically. He cups both hands over his face several times, exhaling against them to warm his nose – which he never did grow into, despite Leia’s sincerest promises, along with those pitcher-handle ears – and watches the breath turn cloudy-white between his fingers. Rey flicks her gaze away whenever Ben catches her staring, bites her lower lip to keep from smiling.

She’s probably thinking what a dope he looks like, Ben figures. Another justified descriptor.  

 _(“Hey, man!”_ came a voice through the phone. _“Rey told me this was your number. You remember me?”_

 _“Of course.”_ Ben had propped an elbow on the bookshelf he was fitting together. _“How are you, Finn?”_

 _“So, listen. I’ve got a young gentleman here who’s about ready to get his punk-ass flunked from junior-year physics – don’t give me that look, Jacen. I told you I’m not letting you drop out, right?”_ A small, conceding laugh had sounded in the background. _“I’m not too strong on this particular subject, but I told him I might know a guy who could point us in the right direction. You got a few minutes?”_

_“Uh –”_

Ben had reached up, drawn a pencil stub from behind his left ear, and pulled over the notebook paper he was using to make dimensional calculations.

_“– Sure. Tell me what the problem is.”)_

Rey’s MT license arrives in the mail a day before she’s called for her first job interview, a part-time position with an orthopedic rehabilitation practice, so she rehearses her professional demeanor while Ben poses as her curmudgeonly future employer. He’s not the ideal candidate for this particular role, honestly, since he can hardly be objective about her, but Rey insists. They sit facing one another in his kitchen, their chairs pulled away from the table.

“A final question, Miss Kenobi.” Ben roughens his voice for added gravitas. He taps his fingertips together and crosses his legs. “What personal quality would you say distinguishes you from all our other candidates?”

Rey has let down her hair and put on a pair of pearl earrings, which glint through the loose, dark brown curls framing her face. Her lightly-balanced features have been glossed over with makeup, covering the freckles, although she has decided bright lipstick will make her look too young and has thus opted for something the jeweled color of pomegranate seeds.

A red smudge has gotten onto her teeth. Rey cleans this with a single, pragmatic swipe of her tongue before responding.

And Ben feels an intrusive warmth suddenly spreading open below his solar plexus as he watches her, creeping up from the base of his spine – she is a friend, he repeats, a true and honest friend, and thus someone who should not be sullied by any unwelcome thoughts – so he focuses scrupulously on her answer.

 “Well, Mister Solo.” Rey wriggles her hips, presumably to straighten her posture. “I would say my most outstanding personal quality is my liminality. I believe I equally embody the principles of both yin and yang, as outlined in philosophies of dualism.”

Hearing her use the words _‘liminality’_ and _‘dualism’_ should not have such an unsettling effect either, but oh well.

“How so?”

“Because first I can put somebody into traction – ” Rey punctuates this by smacking a hard-knuckled fist into her open hand, clenching her fingers around it “ – and then I can help get them out of it.”

He cocks an eyebrow. “Miss Kenobi, are you threatening me?”

“No, Mister Solo,” she chirps, clasping her black-stockinged knees together. “Threats are purely speculative. I only ever make promises.”

They stare at each other for ten full seconds without blinking, until at last Rey crinkles her nose and snorts with laughter.

Ben breaks down laughing as well, glad for this excuse to slacken the – no, it’s not tension, because tension implies two people holding a thread tightly between them, while this problem is entirely his own.  He advises Rey to withhold that last piece of personal information and tell the story about her grandfather instead, with its analogy of the untangled knots, a strategy to which she reluctantly agrees.

The employers find Miss Regina Kenobi to be a very strong, compassionate, energetic candidate, something noted in an unexpectedly personalized e-mail they send her afterwards, but ultimately give the position to someone with more experience.

“That’s unfortunate,” Ben tells her. “For them, mostly. Not so much for you.”

“Ah, it’s all right,” Rey says. “The manager didn’t have a very good sense of humor anyway. It would’ve driven me bananas – can you imagine me getting along with someone who’d take me seriously all the time?”

 _(“To clarify, this would be less of a vertical promotion than a horizontal expansion of your current duties.”_ Hux had slid the updated contract across his desk. _“The station is making plans to distribute its product via satellite feed, but to do that we would require an operator with experience in remote broadcast hookups. Would you qualify?”_

 _“Yes,”_ Ben had answered. _“I can be trained to work with ISDN equipment too, if you need.”_

_“We very well may.”_

_“I told you he’d say yes.”_ Phasma had stuck her head in through the office door. _“What’s a good six-letter synonym for ‘always right’?”_

 _“’P-H-A-S-M-A,”_ they had both hollered back.)

Ben has finally gotten around to hanging his photographs properly, mounting the ones of his father and mother side by side on the formerly-blank wall. He arranges several others around them.

The first shows Luke, his beard and hair almost completely gray now, startled in the act of reading lecture notes at the dinner table – he never stops working, he always takes on more responsibilities than he should, his old professor used to make him study while doing handstands as an exercise in concentration. Another depicts Chewie next to their Christmas tree, gloating over the mutilated remnants of a new and purportedly indestructible toy made from Kevlar – meaning his aged dog’s teeth possess more penetrative power than a 124 grain full-metal jacket bullet, since Ben had been shot once wearing body armor made of the stuff and had gotten only a fist-sized bruise.

The third photograph is faded, grainy black and white, the image of a young man posed on the whitewashed front steps to a house. His remaining arm – the other, metal and plastic from its elbow down, hangs heavy at his side – clasps the shoulders of a small, dark-eyed woman who wears an elaborately patterned silk scarf. His grandmother wore scarves like this to every senate meeting she attended, Ben explains, and she stood out like a tropical bird against all the black-gray-blue suits.

“Padmé?” Rey repeats. “That’s an Indian name, isn’t it? Hindi, I mean.”

“Her father was a British officer. He worked for the Lieutenant-Governor of Bombay before he moved to the United States.” Ben taps the photograph’s polished glass and studies his face reflected in it. “Apparently it means _‘lotus.’_ ”

“That’s very nice – the lotus is supposed to be a sacred flower. They represent rebirth, I think, because of how they grow up out of muddy water towards the sun.” Rey imitates a rising, blooming shape with her hands and arms, and then she hesitates. “That’s what my mother told me, anyway. She was dreadful with plants. She tried growing almost everything in this little window box we had, but all she could ever keep alive was potted rosemary.”

Ben turns to her.

 _(“There’s rosemary,”_ reads Ophelia’s line, in Act Four, _“that’s for remembrance.”)_

Rey has come to return a pair of wire-cutters, which she used last week for hanging up the new bird feeder, along with a staple gun she borrowed to reupholster her new-ish sofa. She had wandered straight past Ben to examine his wall of pictures and begun asking questions, a pensive look on her face. Ben has answered them. 

(And one day, Ben wishes he could promise her, one day she’ll have something like this, not quite the family she waited on for all those years but something just as good.

It will include Finn, and her grandfather, and Sister Maz who learned the critical skill of seeing the same eyes in different people. It will include friends she has not made yet, perhaps children – provided this is what Rey wants, naturally – and a person as strong and steady as she is.

But Ben cannot promise her any of this, clearly. It is not his place to do so.)

“What was her name?” he asks. “You’ve never told me.”

“Well, she’d had it legally changed before I was born.” Rey pulls on a lock of hair above her ear. She still ties it into those three signature buns, occasionally, but has begun alternating between braids and clips and pins as well. “So it wasn’t the name my grandparents gave her, but she always went by Kira.”

“Does that mean anything?”

“She said in Persian it means ‘a beam of light,’” Rey says, “but when I looked it up, you know, later on, I found out it can be a Russian name, too – except then it means ‘ruler.’ I guess the most important thing was how it made her into somebody else, so maybe she chose that one because it could mean both at the same time.”

“Just like your name,” Ben says, although he does not precisely intend to. The force of this revelation startles it out of him. “Rey and Regina.”

“That was her plan, I guess.”

And after she has stood for a while in silence, studying these framed images as though from across a great distance, Rey goes into her apartment and returns with a small photograph pressed against her heart.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hang this up,” she says, offering it to him. “I mean, maybe I will, but not yet. Not for a long time. I just wanted to show you.”

Delicately, Ben accepts the photograph from her by its bottom two corners. One of them has been scorched black.

“I almost burned it, once,” Rey admits. “It got really cold at night, in Jakku, and I didn’t have anything else to start my fire because I’d run out of cardboard. But I changed my mind at the last minute.”

“What stopped you?”

“I’m not sure.” Unconsciously, she folds both arms over herself. “I think I was afraid I’d forget what she looked like, if I did.”

The photograph’s other edges have been rubbed soft, probably from the absent-minded touch of Rey’s hands. Two sharp creases run straight across it, as though it was folded up to be carried inside a pocket at some point, but the faces of its two subjects have been perfectly preserved nonetheless.

The first is Rey, recognizable even at four or five years old, standing barefoot on a patchy afternoon lawn. She stares wide-eyed into the camera’s lens and holds a dandelion – the seeded kind, half its wisps blown away as her tribute to some silent wish – in one sticky little fist. Behind her kneels a very thin, very tired, but momentarily happy-faced young woman, whose large eyes are neither brown nor green but some shade of hazel in the middle.

And she has her arms crossed around Rey, in a now-familiar gesture, embracing her so that each hand pulls on its opposite shoulder as though she’s keeping the pieces of something together.

(You left her, Ben thinks, while he stares down at this last remaining image of Rey’s mother. You were supposed to protect her. You were supposed to come back for her.)

He passes the photograph to Rey again.

“You have her smile,” he says. “I think you’ve made very good use of that, at least.”

“Thank you.” And in demonstration, of course, Rey smiles. “I think so too.”

 _(“I’ll call you when I get home,”_ he’d promised Leia at the airport gate. _“You should come and visit sometime. The apartment’s small, but you get a good view of the bay. I can show you around the city.”_

 _“Hmmm.”_ His mother had looked him up and down, their left eyebrows quirked at identical angles. _“Are you absolutely certain you’re my son, young man? I’m still not entirely convinced.”_

 _“Neither am I.”_ Somewhat stiffly, Ben had reached out to embrace her one more time before he left. _“But I think I can get used to it.”)_

But now Ben encounters a further unforeseen complication, in his friendship with Rey, because he begins to dream about her.

If it were the predictably lewd, tawdry fare, he would at least know enough to feel ashamed and repress the images down into nothingness. Instead they are like double-worded prophecies, like the language of flowers or a bay that turns to ice for the first time in a hundred years.

In one dream Rey sits before him, reclined on a silver throne and wearing draped white cloth. Ben kneels at her feet, dressed in battered and blade-scored black armor with a long, trailing cloak spread around him. The air between them seems to shimmer and leap as though alive.

 _Don’t be afraid,_ he tries to tell her, although his mouth does not move while he says it. _I feel it too._

 _You,_ he hears Rey’s voice answer, with venomous contempt. _You’re afraid._

In another dream they move through a dark and snow-filled forest, wielding blades of living light high in their hands. Rey’s strikes are dancing and dazzling-quick, her sword the blue color of a newborn star. Ben’s strikes are crashing and brutish, as though his strength has already been spent, and his sword resembles the red-hot iron drawn out of a blacksmith’s forge. Sparks erupt each time their weapons make contact. Trees are sliced down around them. They seize each other’s wrists, strain with a dead-locking effort, and the force he feels through his arms and shoulders tells Ben they are evenly matched.

Rey cuts him down in a single, savage flourish.

And then he collapses into the snow, the scar on his face searing as though new-made, and Rey stalks closer towards him while her eyes blaze out power and rage and terrible beauty. The earth rives itself in half to create a great chasm between them. 

Ben wakes from this dream with a wild, thrashing pulse. The breath feels snared in his chest. He spends five minutes bent over the kitchen sink, running cold water across the exposed back of his neck and letting it drip through his hair.

It must be a lingering effect of the addiction, he reasons to himself, some permanent damage he has done to his brain along with those scarred vessels in his heart.

How melodramatic.

Ben towels his hair dry and crawls back into bed. His run the next morning takes him almost ten miles at a pace so heedless and driving that afterwards he needs to ice his left iliotibial band with a bag of frozen peas.

“Do you want me to look at that?” Rey turns with a laundry basket on her hip when he hobbles past her in the hallway. “You can’t massage an injury until at least forty-eight hours after it happens, but I can –”

“That’s not necessary.” Ben beats an undaunted fist against his side, harder than he means to. “And if they need to amputate, there’s always the promising possibility that I’ll be able to replace it with a bionic limb.”

“Ever the optimist, huh?”

(He is much worse at this whole unselfish love business than his father and mother, it seems, who were so patient and abiding with him for so long while he gave them nothing in return.

 _“You’re on your own with this one, kid_.” Ben sends the knife zipping into a little pressboard target he’s constructed. It lands just off-center. _“Don’t tear yourself apart.”)_

The final week of January, while Ben sits drafting a personal admissions essay and Rey reads a tattered copy of _Wuthering Heights_ she has found in a box at the junkyard – Heathcliff is a darkly compelling character, she admits, but she prefers Hareton Earnshaw because he has such a good, noble heart despite everything – her cell phone rings.

The call comes from ANCH-2 Hospital, about forty miles north of Takodana Bay. The directors were very pleased with her application and phone interview, the employment manager says, and they would be interested in sitting down to meet her in person. Would she be able to come see them tomorrow, possibly?

“Yes!” She gives Ben a waggling thumbs-up, which he diffidently returns. “I’d be delighted. What time would you like me to be there?”

Ben drives her to the train station at 7:45 AM. She talks the whole while without stopping, as expected, a thrilled flush riding in her eyes and cheeks.

“It’s one of the only hospitals on the whole eastern seaboard with a full-time team for massage therapy,” she tells him, rapidly. “They work with all sorts of diagnoses and patients – cardiopulmonary, neurology, hematology, oncology, trauma, you name it. Some of that’s for rehabilitation or pain management, obviously, but they put a lot of emphasis on the emotional aspects too. That’s why I liked them so much.”

“Good.” Ben checks his side-view mirror for a third time, shakes his head. “I mean, that’s very good. Would they give you any training?”

“I’d have a senior staff member as my mentor for the first six months. Then afterwards I’d be able to work on getting a specialization added to my license – I was thinking about neuromuscular or scar tissue therapy, but I’ll have to see.” She flips through the manila folder she carries, full of maps and information sheets and letters of recommendation, until she finds a picture. “Oh, and they have a rooftop garden with its own greenhouse. It’s got the biggest wisteria I’ve ever seen.”

Ben maneuvers his car through cumbersome downtown traffic. Which road is he supposed to take? Which lane should he merge into? Fiddle-fuck. Rey’s effervescent voice keeps tugging at his attention, while the blaring horns and crossing pedestrians make him feel as though he’s being pressed by a dense crowd of strangers, so he must take a controlled sigh.

“I’m sorry,” he tells her, “but would you copilot for a moment? My innate sense of direction seems to be failing me.”

“Certainly, Captain Solo.” Rey sifts through her folder again, pulls out a set of directions, then reads aloud in a taciturn announcer’s voice. “You’ll need to take a left at this next intersection – how far in advance would you like to hear everything?”

“Three steps, maybe. That way I can plan it out first.” He’s stopped at the red light, so he can wave a hand beside his head. “Do you suppose they’d let you keep a plot inside the greenhouse?”

He should be overwhelmed with embarrassment at his own blundering incompetence, probably, but Rey doesn’t seem to mind very much and so Ben decides he ought not to mind either. She hops out when he pulls into the station’s drop-off lane.

“Okay.” A slice of cold wind ruffles Rey’s hair as she sticks her head back inside the car. The scent of orange blossom perfume wafts from her coat and oversized yellow scarf. “Here I go. Wish me luck.”

The preposterous impulse to lean himself over and kiss her on the mouth rolls through Ben like a breaking wave. He keeps his hands around the steering wheel.

“I sincerely doubt you’ll need it.”

“True.”

She makes that same nonsensical, reciprocal waving motion while she walks away, the one that indicates either an electromagnetic field line or a similarly invisible force connecting them.

And, once more, watching her through his windshield, Ben sends this same motion back. 

He spends the whole workday in a state of mild, distracted displacement – he should invest in a cell phone, finally, although he would need something durable that his hands could not mismanage – and picks Rey up again at the train station just after sunset. She stands balanced on the curb, holding herself rigidly upright, and despite her greeting smile he can see at once that something is wrong.

Rey climbs into the car, fumbles with the seat belt. Ben waits for her to speak as he pulls out again.

“Um.” She takes the mittens off her hands to start wringing them like dishcloths. “Good news first, I guess. They offered me the job.”

“What?” He glances at her, wondering if this deflated dénouement is an act. It does not appear to be. “Are you going to take it?”

“Oh, of course. Of course. I’d be completely crazy not to. They gave me three days to think it over, and my orientation wouldn’t technically start until the middle of February, but I’m going to call them first thing tomorrow and accept. It’s just, uh.” Rey bites the inside of her cheek. Her mascara is smudged. “I was doing some math, on the train ride home. The salary they’ve offered me is extremely generous, I mean, for an entry-level position, but –”

A heavy-winged premonition settles down atop Ben’s heart.

“Yes?”

“The commute every day would be too expensive. I thought I could do it, but now that I’ve tried – even if I got some sort of yearly pass for the metro line, or if I bought a used car, it wasn’t practical when I added it all up. And I added it four separate times.” She settles back against the seat. “I’ll have to move.” 

The words land with a deep-resounding thud.  

Ben pauses to think.

So she will move out, yes, and whoever moves in to take her place will not grow flowers, or know Morse code, or keep a bird feeder that looks like his father’s Falcon M1 airplane, or have so many strange and esoteric and lovely things to say about untangling knots and invisible forces that hold both the body and the galaxy together. They will not carry a name that can mean ' _queen’_ and ‘ _sunshine’_ at equal turns, and even if they do the name will not be nearly so well suited to them. She will leave.

And yet:

She will also be going somewhere new because she chooses to, some place with a rooftop garden and people who will be her teachers. She will fill up a new home with her plants and absurd scrap-heap furniture, rehang the gift he has made for her, and hopefully she will be somewhere that lets her watch the sunrise. She will meet new people, perhaps ones who can be added to that patchwork family he’s imagined for her.

Ben will stay here, but he has his own life to live now as well. And they’re friends, after all. That ought to count for something.

He can do this.

“All right,” Ben says, as she once said to him while they stared at the shattered glass on his floor. “All right.”

“Yeah. I don’t know why I’m moping – I’m really excited! It’s just a hassle, you know?” There is an oddly disappointed slump to her shoulders, although Ben cannot see any error in his answer. “It’s a lot to plan. I’ll need to start packing right away.”

“I’ll bring some old boxes from the radio station,” he offers. “You can use them to transport your plants.”

“Thank you. That’d be helpful.”

After this, Rey is silent.

Bronze-colored light from the streetlamps passes over her face while they drive, momentarily creating an abstracted curve of her arm or a wave of her hair out of the car’s private darkness. Ben remembers his dream about her in the snowy forest, with the burning blue sword, remembers how the earth had split apart between them.  Her silence remains seamless and uninterrupted until they have walked in from the parking lot, boarded the apartment’s finally-repaired elevator, have stood side by side and watched its double doors close.

Rey turns to him.

“Okay, Ben,” she says. “I’m stumped. Help me out here for a second.”

Ben frowns at her. There is a faint, cheerful ding when they pass the first floor.

And then a sense of anamnesis overcomes him in a great, flattening rush, like details remembered from a former life, and he realizes they have managed to circle right back around to where they started a year ago – although the elevator is moving upwards, this time, so perhaps it is more like time played in reverse.

“What do you need to know?”

“The first two weeks I lived here,” she begins, “You didn’t say a single word to me. I think you even turned around and walked the other way a few times, when you saw me coming. I kept wondering what I’d done to offend you – I looked at my neck in the mirror to be sure I hadn’t contracted the plague.”

He grimaces. Rey taps him on the shoulder.

“But then I’m getting into this elevator, one night, and when I hear some thunderous voice telling me, ‘ _wait_ ,’ it takes me a second to even realize who it’s coming from.” Rey keeps her gaze steadily on him, as though staring through a scope. “So, I want to know – what made you change your mind, all of a sudden?”

Ben’s mouth goes dry. Another number lights up, another and another as the elevator’s cables wail and grind.

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.

He passes a hand through his hair. The gesture is more tightly-controlled than he plans it to be, because he is wearing his father’s leather jacket and this makes raising his arm above the shoulder rather difficult.

Yes, fine. Very well. He can do this too.

“Damien told me to come speak with you.”

“What?” Her face scrunches in sour distaste. “Seriously? Why the hell would he do that?”

“His sense of humor always tended towards the sophomoric, and I wasn’t exactly accustomed to refusing him at that point. I was, uh –” Ben closes his eyes, attempts not to hear himself. “– I was supposed to ask you out, if you can believe that.”

“No way.”

“Yes, unfortunately.” He opens his eyes again. “I’m sorry.”

He expects her to snort at this, to laugh at such an admittedly laughable idea, or else to be snappish and angry at having accidentally built her friendship upon such a foolish foundation – but Rey simply shakes her head. Their elevator reaches the seventh floor. They exit it together.

“Do you think you would’ve ever started talking to me, otherwise?” Rey asks. “If he hadn’t dared you to?”

“I’d like to imagine so.” But Ben pictures himself wearing the unraveled sweater, so thin his bones had seemed to chafe at his skin from the inside, his body broken apart into pieces under some relentless and burdening weight. “No, probably not. I suppose we’ll never know.”

“Huh.”

Rey wrests the apartment keys from her pocket, turns them in her lock, steps through the door and allows Ben to come inside as well. It swings softly shut behind him. She hangs up her coat and scarf without hitting the light switch, while Ben removes his own jacket to lay it over a kitchen chair, but then Rey abruptly stops moving and so does he.

They stand, give or take several marginal steps, about five feet apart from one another. The room is dark save for beams of strong white moonlight coming in through her eastward-facing windows.

“It’s too bad I’ll probably never see that fuck-trumpet again.” There is a peculiar restriction in Rey’s voice, a poised tightness to her body. “I’d still like to knock him flat, don’t get me wrong, but I guess now I have something to thank him for.”

“You shouldn’t be too grateful.” Ben looks down at himself, and he cannot understand what Rey is staring at. “He only made me do that because he knew I’d permanently fuck it up.”

“Here’s the funny thing,” Rey says. “I’m not so sure you did.”

Ben looks up at her again.

“What?”

Rey closes the distance between them in two smart, businesslike steps, reaches up to put both her hands on his face, then draws a deep breath when she tugs his head down and kisses him.

Except the combination of her haste and his height makes Rey’s tightly-pursed lips land at a skewed angle, catching more chin than mouth. They nearly overbalance as Ben stumbles a step forward in surprise, as Rey stumbles a step backwards as well so that he will not tread on her feet. His fast-twitch reaction is to snatch her by the shoulders and steady them both, together, to pull himself upright again after four vertiginous seconds.

Objectively speaking, in other words, it is a disaster.

They study one another in the liminal moment that follows. Rey’s hands remain on his face.

“Well!” She huffs, so vigorously it disturbs a dangling lock of hair on her forehead. “Sorry. That didn’t go the way I’d planned.”

“Things rarely do, I’ve learned.” Ben does not let go of her either.  “Should we try again?”

“You know, I think that’s a good idea.”

Ben smiles, closes his eyes, bends down.

Rey slips her arms forward to rest on his shoulders, rocks up onto her toes, arches her back with another deep breath as he leans close and tightens his arms around her. There is a brief bumping of noses before her lips, slightly opened now, press themselves inquiringly against his for one long, anapestic beat. The kiss Ben gives her in reply is more insistent and is broken into two longer, even parts, which she accepts and returns, and then Rey tilts her head sideways and holds her lips against the heartbeat in his throat.

She comes back down solidly onto her feet. They draw apart, just far enough to look at each other, and Rey pushes idle fingers through his hair.

“You’d probably laugh if you knew how long I’ve thought about this.” Her hand makes another slow pass over and under the tangled curls, this time straying below his shirt collar to linger on the flushed skin there. “It was a bit ridiculous, some of it.”

Ben brushes his knuckles across her cheek, down to her chin.

“Was it?”

“Yes.” She cradles his face in her hands again. “Here. I’ll show you.”

Rey bows his head down as though to bestow an accolade and kisses him at the far right corner of his mouth. She kisses the angle formed between his nose and cheek, the space between his brows where a frown usually goes – then she brings her lips further up to the very top of his forehead and trails them, feather-light, down the whole diagonal course of his scar, placing a last kiss just above where it cuts into his jaw. 

Ben holds his breath, because this last gesture sets a deep ache in his chest, though he must let the breath go – is sounds only slightly uneven – when Rey lifts her mouth close to his ear.

“Okay,” she says. “Your turn.”

He cannot be quite as slow, so he moves instead with a single-minded and claim-staking needfulness that makes her start to laugh. He kisses the skin of her left temple, the freckles across her nose and cheeks, the long lashes,  her lips – twice, three, four times in teasing snatches, and now he’s laughing too – and the exposed curve of her neck which she lolls her head sideways to offer him. He takes her hands and gathers them together between his own as though they are flowers.

Then Ben presses Rey’s callused fingers to his lips and holds them this way, closing his eyes.  He listens to the sound of her quieting breath.

They stay like this until Rey gently slides her hands free, taking him by the wrists instead as she walks the few feet back towards her sofa.

“I’m, uh –” Rey sinks onto the cushions while Ben remains standing. Their hands remain together. “Feeling a little light-headed, I think. You?”

Ben nods.

In films, he has always observed rather stodgily, nobody ever stops to take off their winter boots, probably because it is a clumsy and un-titillating process, but they both have to do it now. There’s also little that can be done about how small the sofa is, at least compared to Ben, so Rey lies down on her side while he curves his body parenthetically around her. Their heads come to rest on a somewhat lumpy but serviceable pillow. He crosses his arms, collecting her inward so that her back is held against his chest, and finally rests his lips on the nape of her neck. Wisps of her hair tickle his nose.

Rey picks up one of his hands and kisses the palm, which he finds an odd choice but does not consider further.

“I need to tell you something crazy,” she says.

She cannot see him smiling, but she can likely feel it on her skin. Ben fits one of his legs more neatly together with hers, so that their ankles are crossed, and her stockinged toes all curl up at once. He feels her bones shifting as she moves, her side rising and falling as she breathes, the wing-beat thrumming of a pulse as her heart beats.

 “Rey, saying you need to tell me something crazy would imply that you’ve ever told me something sane I could compare it to.”

“It’s a sliding scale, all right? Relatively crazy.” She nudges an elbow into his stomach. “You want to hear this or not?”

“Please.”

“The week after I let you back into your apartment – in February, that time you locked yourself out? I mentioned you to my grandfather. I was telling him how you weren’t the particular brand of stampeding tosser I’d initially figured you for.” Ben laughs, and Rey briskly flips his hand over to kiss the knuckles. “Then when he asked me what I thought your age was, I just told him you seemed older.”

“I am older,” Ben reminds her. 

“Yes, but that’s not how I meant it. But then – this sounds silly.” Rey twists her shoulders restively back and forth. Ben eases his hold just enough for her to turn herself around in his arms, to face him, and she begins rifling her fingers through his hair again. “Then I told you that idiotic joke, while the power was out, and I realized I’d never seen you laugh before.” 

“Was it that unexpected?”

“It was like you’d taken off a mask. I don’t think I looked at you the same, after that.” Rey’s fingers travel along the shell of his ear, and she kisses him in the half-aware way of someone acting from memory. “I just wanted to tell you I think it’s a very nice sound.”

Ben has never been this close to her before. It lets him see the individual colors in her eyes, where the green changes into brown, and he wonders how he should respond. He does not deserve her, Ben knows, and never will, but this is not what he wants to tell her because it would largely be missing the point of what she has just told him – and what, possibly, the past year has been attempting to tell him as well.

He kisses her, drawing her as close as he can in recompense for the years she's spent holding herself in that solitary, shadowed imitation of things she has lost. It’s a start, at least.

Ben rests their foreheads together and keeps his eyes closed.

“I love you,” he says, simply. 

“I didn’t know,” Rey laughs. “I wasn’t sure – but I was sure that I loved you, so I had to figure it was worth the risk. It certainly wouldn’t have been the first one I’d ever taken.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

Then one of her hands slides up, between them, and settles over his heart.

“So, Ben Solo.” Rey drums her fingers expectantly, sensibly. “What happens next?”

He must contemplate his answer. Outside, on her balcony, a strong gust of wind blows, and the propeller to a scrap-metal model airplane gives one spinning turn before it goes silent again.

_(“Don’t you trust me?”)_

Ben can think of a million reasons why this may not work – she is moving away, they are as different as they are alike, the decade between their ages could grow to feel like an opened chasm after all, he is still recollecting the pieces of himself and knows he might never be finished, and suppose he is not able to give Rey the happiness or the family or the life she deserves – and exactly one reason why it will, which is that he is going to try anyway.

And those, he decides, are good enough odds.

Ben lifts his hand and places it over Rey’s, speaks quietly into her ear.

“We’ll see.”

…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Janus was the Roman deity of beginnings, endings, change, time, passages and doorways. He also presided over war and peace, hence the yearly rites to honor him at the start and conclusion of a soldier’s campaign season. 
> 
> He is traditionally depicted with two faces – one looks backwards into the past, while the other looks forward into the future, since life requires us to do a lot of both – and was always worshiped in conjunction with Vesta. Like her Greek counterpart, Hestia, she was the goddess of the home and hearth-fire as well as the protector of the family. 
> 
> The Falcon M1 airplane described in this story, including its specifications and modifications, is based on the much-lauded and well-loved Cessna 180. The massage therapy techniques and concepts in physics are entirely real, although I sincerely apologize for any inaccuracies since those aren’t my areas of expertise. There is no extant 77th Special Forces Group, but there used to be, as it has since been renamed the 7th Special Forces Group. The saying ‘Pro Utilitate Hominum,’ which Obi-Wan mentions in Chapter Two, derives from the slightly longer ‘Pro Fide, Pro Utilitate Hominum,’ a motto that ultimately traces back to the Order of the Knights of St. John.
> 
> Hux, Phasma, Finn, and Obi-Wan all kind of grew organically within this story, to the extent that I didn’t know what they were going to say or do until I actually wrote their scenes. I’ve gotten very attached to them all, as well as to Ben and Rey. I never intended for this piece to expand into what it did, but it’s been an emotionally gratifying (and exhausting, whew) experience. 
> 
> Again, I have to request a standing ovation for my beta incognitajones, who helped fit this all together and continually gave me her much-needed advice and encouragement. 
> 
> And whether you call it redemption or reconciliation or recovery, whether that struggle is with some metaphysical Dark Side in a galaxy far, far away or with the endlessly varied equivalents that bring such a galaxy closer to us, the process usually isn’t easy. It’s difficult, sometimes near-impossible, but I’ll be damned if you aren’t worth every second of that fight. 
> 
> Thank you all for reading.


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